If the smashing literary success of Normal People was any scale for the Rooney verse, the 33-year-old Irish writer is not straying too far from her trope of writing in her newest work of fiction to come out in over three years.
In Intermezzo, Rooney writes about unacknowledged grief, following two Irish brothers, 32-year-old lawyer Peter Koubek and 22-year-old chess genius Ivan Koubek, as they deal with the long-anticipated death of their father.
The book is a tale of the grief surrounding the Koubek brothers and the strained relationship they share and the women in their lives. The lingering bitterness between Peter and Ivan only widens as they begin to deal with profound sadness when Ivan begins a romantic relationship with Margaret, who serves as an administrator at a local chess center and is a decade older than him and divorced.
Enter Peter, who begins to medicate himself to sleep while juggling relationships with two women at the same time his longtime flame and ex-girlfriend Sylvie and a college student and camgirl Naomi.
The younger of the two siblings, Ivan, often comes across as shocked to find he is loved. Ivan is both stubborn and sensitive and walks the dual path of alienating while being hopeful for reconciliation. The elder one, Peter, doesn’t think he deserves the adoration of both Sylvie and Naomi while finding conflict in the realization of his simultaneous loyalty to both women. Peter is happy to be “known as a cheater to the public rather than a freak”.
Rooney’s writing in Intermezzo is almost oceanic; the rise and fall of sentences is enchanting, but in places where it should, the waters do go deep. It’s probably where she also drives the unprecedented single-word title of this book, Intermezzo, in a crossover of a term between music and chess.
In chess, intermezzo is an “in-between” move that turns a game in an unexpected direction; in musical opera, intermezzo connects two acts. Probably Rooney is trying to do the same with her writing as she leaves behind her late 20s, when her characters were racing towards adulthood.
At the same time, the ghosts of their teenage actions ran parallel to them, to now, in her early 30s, where her characters navigate the complexities of being the voice of reason as they get older and wiser. Intermezzo is probably the bridge between Rooney’s three books in a row to now, her fourth.
Rooney’s sense of character inclination towards Ivan comes rather inconspicuously; she chooses not to let the reader glimpse at Peter through either of the two women who love him, but Ivan seems to get not only a harsh but reticent critique of his older brother but also the endearing lens of Margaret.
The voice in Intermezzo comes predominantly from the two men and siblings, Peter and Ivan. Naomi is the only central character who doesn’t ever become Sally’s point of view in the book. At the same time, Margaret is the most charming voice in the book, especially in the descriptions of Ivan, wherein “his hands look precise and elegant, like the hands of a surgeon or a pianist”.
Rooney writes her fourth novella in close third person, with Ivan being lent the anxious chapters and Peter the more rational ones. It takes a while for the often-jumping-rather-jarring shift in perspectives to completely make sense, but deeper into the book, you are drawn to them.
Peter and Ivan’s father, whose presence essentially comes from his absence due to cancer, is the core of their lives. But Sally is keeping Koubek senior only on the periphery of the book to make space for umpteen other forms of love in the book. An instance is Margaret and her relationship with her mother, or Ivan’s with his dog. Certain scenes are overly emotional, but the book is replete with tender moments of Rooney’s incredible writing of weaving comic phrases together with realistic descriptions, even when dealing with phases as somber as death.
It comes alive in phrases such as when Peter makes a note of Ivan at their father’s wake, where he is “loitering miserably alone at the table of sandwiches, in an ill-fitted suit”.
Rooney keeps up with her infamous tradition of abandoning quotations while writing dialogue even in Intermezzo, but controversially, unlike her work in Conversations with Friends, her newest book remains lucid at all times.
Some other traditions Rooney is not breaking away from are her romantic entanglements. Despite beginning the book with a funeral, the two central characters affected the most by the aforementioned death are not vulnerable to each other through a major portion of the book. Peter isn’t able to get over his relationship with Sylvie, who breaks off their over a half-decade-long relationship over a debilitating accident, which leaves lovemaking between them a painful experience for her.
Peter is quelling his growing fondness for Naomi as his years-long love for Sylvie haunts him. Ivan is reticent but warms up to his 14-year-old senior Margaret, birthing one of the most gorgeous relationships that Rooney writes about in the novel. The only weakness that peeks through the plotline is that of Naomi, who more often than not lurks dangerously close to being the off-putting and blithe ‘Generation Z’ character in the book.
It is probably why Naomi never becomes the voice throughout the book. Sally is not straying away from her oft-discussed themes of power dynamics, religion, and a looming housing crisis in Dublin in the book, which shares precedence in her earlier works, especially Normal People.
Relationships sustain the characters in Intermezzo, especially their interconnectedness. An easier summary of the book would be “more life,” a phrase that appears through Margaret in the book. But it is a slow- pace, incredibly reflective of a book. The characters are enduringly memorable, and anyone looking for a flippant read would be in for a rude shock.
Rooney is delivering sacred truths, such as when she says, “Life is much more than just talking,” with a tone too banal for everyday usage in the book. It is as if mourning comes innately to Rooney throughout the book, and yet she balances off the cerebral relationships of her characters with devastating gentleness. She concludes hopefully in the book, which leaves a few readers dissatisfied and wanting for more ambiguity, but the book does hold a lot without breaking if that is some respite.
Rooney does not care for such affectations, for Intermezzo is a delicious read. It is Sally Rooney staring back at the reader and asking them if they would choose love over certainty.
