Sally Rooney’s fourth novel is not exactly her best, nor likely to be her best loved. In her last book, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), a character – fresh from reading Henry James – enthuses: “Have you ever read such a juicy novel?” It’s not a question most readers of her new one will come away exclaiming. But if Intermezzo is not Rooney’s juiciest novel, it is her meatiest. The thickness of the book – her first to exceed 400 pages – is a clue that it will not resemble the sleek vehicles for sexual tension that made her famous. Intermezzo lacks the taut self-assurance of Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), but it is an honourable, tenacious and not unsuccessful attempt to go beyond them, and to leave – indeed to run some distance from – her formal comfort zone.
Intermezzo hews to Rooney’s signature geometry – couples whose romantic happiness is temporarily obstructed for our entertainment – but ups the stakes. Conversations with Friends and Normal People feature illness – mental and physical – and difficult family situations, especially those arising from absent or erratic fathers. But serious material tended to be a kind of background noise, with little direct bearing on the romantic action. In Intermezzo such issues – bereavement, depression, addiction – are central, and impinge on the characters’ love lives. Conversations with Friends and Normal People are youthful, summery novels (both feature a semi-climactic holiday in a European villa). Intermezzo is an adult, autumnal book set in and around dark, rainy Dublin.
Rooney’s previous novels are about friends – none of the protagonists are related – but Intermezzo is about family. The novel principally rotates between the contrasting perspectives of two warring brothers, whose father has just died.
Ivan is 22, a gauche chess prodigy past his prime with braces; Peter, ten years older, is a smooth but troubled lawyer. Rooney’s weakness for symmetry survives: each brother is involved in a semi-secret relationship whose age gap mirrors their own. Peter is dating – somewhat transactionally – a broke student named Naomi; Ivan spends his weekends visiting Margaret, a benevolent, slightly lonely woman in her mid-thirties, whom he meets at a chess exhibition match in a village a couple of hours’ drive from Dublin. The age difference is compounded by graver complications: Peter is not over his university girlfriend – now “platonic life partner” – Sylvia, a lecturer in English, who ended things after an accident left her in chronic pain and unable to enjoy sex. Margaret’s separation from her alcoholic husband has left her feeling so guilty and ashamed that she feels she must conceal her relationship with Ivan.
The epigraph to Conversations with Friends comes from Frank O’Hara: “In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love” – yet the crises in Rooney’s previous novels, though inflected by class differences, rarely transcend the dimensions of a romantic dilemma. When Frances wonders if her involvement with Nick, a blandly handsome married actor, might have “lasting consequences for my happiness”, it sounds like one of her dry jokes. The grieving Peter and Ivan, by contrast, are lost and stalled, in the throes of something much more existential. Their relationships with Sylvia and Margaret are seismic, explicitly bound up not just with their immediate happiness, but with whether they feel life is worth living and themselves worthy of love.
All Rooney’s novels chart the evolving dynamics of complicated sexual relationships; Intermezzo also seeks to convey personal development (arguably a little too much development: Ivan blossoms with dubious suddenness). The agents of reconciliation and growth are Margaret and Sylvia, positive influences who help each brother shed his caricatured, outdated impressions of the other. Goodness has dethroned charisma: Margaret and Sylvia – as you might guess from their names – are reminiscent of George Eliot’s virtuous heroines. Neither is as interesting or sharply drawn as Rooney’s other female protagonists, who tended to be magnetic and witty, spiky and domineering. Margaret may even be a little dowdy.
The new structure of feeling – tender, sombre – is especially evident in the sex. All of Rooney’s novels contain a notable, commercially strategic, amount of sex (“If there’s a well-enough rendered sense of sexual tension, the reader will read almost anything,” she once observed rather baldly in an interview). The sex scenes in her novels are so punctual that they are almost a metronomic device. The problem for a literary novelist is to justify them, to make them seem as though they are not just about sex – or rather, that sex is about something. Rooney hasn’t always risen to the challenge. Beautiful World, her weakest novel, contains the most sex, or the most graphic sex, but since the characters are bland and their relationships lifeless, the main effect of the anatomical exactitude is bafflement.
The sex in Intermezzo, by contrast, is naturalistic, distinctive, memorable, suffused with emotional, even existential significance, and not totally seamless: there are confessions of nervousness, unsynchronised orgasms, logistical hitches (the first time he sleeps with Margaret, Ivan has to check the expiry date on the condom “he got for free in college like two years ago”). The novel succeeds in making sex meaningful, rather than just featuring it heavily, and celebrates forms of intimacy that have more to do with our bodies – or our being – than our minds. The key relationships in Rooney’s other books have a self-consciously textual component, and are partly literary constructions: Frances relishes rereading old messages from Bobbi in Conversations with Friends; Connell writes carefully composed emails to Marianne in Normal People; half of Beautiful World is correspondence. The emphasis in Intermezzo is on wordless, animal communion: intimate silences, eloquent looks, ineffable bonds. To love someone in the novel is to feel good when you are near them. Peter and Sylvia – like Rooney, former student debaters – enjoy high-flown conversation about current affairs and critical theory but we’re mostly not treated to it first hand. “Oh, you take conversation too seriously,” Sylvia says to Peter early on: “Life isn’t just talking.” Verbal communication is demoted with almost propagandistic insistency: “Who can explain such a thing, and why even try to explain: an understanding shared between two people.”
We are surely supposed to hear a loud rejection of the spirit of Rooney’s previous books, which were impressed by cleverness and powered by repartee. The conversation in Intermezzo may be less slick and fizzy, but it is more serious and substantial – and not devoid of wit or charm. Whereas Frances and Bobbi sparred about love as a “discursive practice” under capitalism, Ivan apologises for his awkwardness with touching earnestness:
Like the way I talked so much about chess, I honestly don’t know why I did that. I think I was just a little bit nervous, because I’m not too experienced at those situations or whatever. But I wouldn’t be like that again. If we saw each other again, I mean. I would be a lot different.
“Still in the same quiet voice she says: I wouldn’t want you to be different.
“Okay, he says. That’s good, because I actually don’t know if I would be. Even though I just said I would. But if you don’t want me to, it’s better.”
Ivan, the most compelling character in the book, is the main conduit for Rooney’s excellent sense of humour. He’s not self-consciously witty but – harder to pull off – naturally funny.
What makes Intermezzo better than its predecessors is what makes it more imperfect: it is Rooney’s most wholehearted novel but also her most sentimental; her most uninhibited but not her most compulsive; her most likeable but not her coolest; her most highbrow but not her most accomplished. The book is sprayed with references to classical music – the source of its Italianate title – and literary borrowings, itemised in an appendix. The greatest gain that is also the greatest loss concerns its style. Though heavily stylised, Intermezzo is not a stylish book. Its conspicuously average, headlong first sentence – “Didn’t seem fair on the young lad” – is mainly remarkable for its contrast with the impassive poise we’ve come to know. This was already on its way out in Beautiful World, in which Rooney took her aloofness to artificial extremes, turning an effective style into a gratuitously distant manner. Intermezzo has cast it off altogether, prompting the question: what was Sally Rooney’s style?
For all its casual sound, even gait, and plain, contemporary diction – “as effortless as emailing”, in the phrase of one critic – the style of Conversations with Friends and Normal People was, in its low-key way, flawless. The clean, smooth finish didn’t draw attention to itself – brushed steel rather than gleaming chrome – yet it was backlit by an electric intelligence capable of sudden virtuosity. Little fireworks of observation and arresting description were set off with equally arresting nonchalance (“The clouds were green and the stars reminded me of sugar”; “She slipped out of my grasp like a thought”). It was Rooney’s sparing deployment of these gifts – her willingness to default to a daring blandness – that was partly what made her first two novels, both written in her mid-twenties (she is now 33), seem so precociously self-possessed.
“Bobbi and I first met Melissa at a poetry night in town, where we were performing together,” Conversations with Friends began; Rooney can hardly be accused of trying to make a splash. But she subtly charged her scrupulously functional sentences with implication and tension. She proved herself a master of efficient suggestion, of stowing information into economical, utilitarian description that wouldn’t be out of place in a script. Conversations with Friends and Normal People surely made for successful TV shows in part because they already were a bit like TV shows (Beautiful World, with its stilted remoteness from its characters – “A woman sat in a hotel bar… She glanced at the screen of her phone, on which was displayed a messaging interface” – is almost a CCTV show).
Consider their openings, how they establish or foreshadow dynamics with the barest means. In Conversations with Friends Frances sits in a cab behind Bobbi and can “see the back of her neck and her little spoon-like ear”. We haven’t yet been told that Frances and Bobbi were once together, but through that tiny observation – her “little spoon-like ear” – we sense that Frances loves Bobbi, that she knows and is fond of her body. The opening of Normal People is similarly dense with clues: “Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell. She’s still wearing her school uniform, but she’s taken off the sweater, so it’s just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights.”
That first sentence looks unimpeachable but it’s subtly odd, suggestive of the pattern of a relationship, rather than the single moment it purports to describe. It captures Marianne and Connell’s future together – the seamless syntax foretelling their deep affinity and sexual compatibility; its order intimating Connell’s power over Marianne, her helplessness before him. The little redundancies in the next sentence (no sweater “just the blouse”; no shoes “only tights”) are hints that what seems an innocent attempt to be precise may in fact be Connell lingering over Marianne’s appearance, almost as though the sentence (channelling his perspective) is undressing her. The next sentences then establish Marianne’s dominance:
“She turns and walks down the hall. He follows her, closing the door behind him. Down a few steps in the kitchen, his mother Lorraine is peeling off a pair of rubber gloves. Marianne hops onto the countertop and picks up an open jar of chocolate spread, in which she has left a teaspoon.”
Note the freighted juxtaposition: Marianne insouciantly “hopping” onto the counter that Connell’s mother, laboriously “peeling”, has probably just wiped down.
This preference for near-subliminal communication is a hallmark of Rooney’s early style, and it depended on rationing our access to the information that novelists, unlike script writers say, have special licence to provide: direct insight into what a character is feeling. It is no coincidence that when Rooney did allow herself brief dispatches from her characters’ minds, she was often conveying a particular kind of consciousness: self-consciousness – that uneasy state distinguished by not feeling entirely inside yourself. Focusing on characters who feel estranged from themselves – Frances fears she doesn’t have a personality, Connell that his personality is “something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others” – was practically a formal necessity.
Intermezzo flings open the floodgates to interiority: it’s a stream of consciousness – a torrent in Peter’s case. The resulting prose is not beautiful nor always pleasant to read (especially when among Peter’s choppy thoughts, frazzled by insomnia and depression). But the war is won on the battlefield of detail. In Conversations with Friends, Frances selectively dropped articulate hints about her inner life. In Intermezzo, we are submerged in the welter of internal experience, less among clever thoughts than messy feelings – feelings characters can’t identify, feelings that hide behind other feelings. If the prose loses some of its glittering precision, it is more immersively realistic: observations are mediated by thought, the record of spontaneous impressions (Ivan finds that “the sheets on the bed feel cold, maybe damp, or maybe just very cold”).
The level of detail in Intermezzo is joyously pointless – pointless except for the profound pleasure of stuffing life into a book in all its banal glory: Peter “forgetting he let the blind down. Just a blank white square now, no idea why he did that”; Ivan picking up a surprise call from Margaret on a charging phone, “so in order to hear anything he’ll have to crouch on the floor beside the nightstand”; or pretending to scan a menu even though “he had already decided before then by looking at the restaurant website”. Rooney bothers to tell us that Margaret is buying her mother a dishwasher and to relay the logistics involved in transporting Ivan’s dog between houses. After the lean glamour of Rooney’s first two novels, one savours such mundane embellishments.
Rooney’s newfound fondness for making things explicit leaves her more prone to overdoing it: “There seems to have been in both their lives a period of exuberant repeated triumph, for Ivan his final years at secondary school, for Peter his time at college, which in both cases came to a disheartening close.” This is a useful summary better placed in a review than in the novel itself. Her more intimate inhabitation of her characters can give rise to corny lines, or produce maudlin sententiousness: “without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgement, reproval, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another.”
Such an avowal wouldn’t be caught dead in Rooney’s first two books (nor would that sonorous list of abstract nouns) and sometimes the influence of the 19th-century novel can seem more unmetabolised than it did in Normal People, whose epigraph was taken from Daniel Deronda. Margaret’s fear of judgement about her incomplete divorce, for example – though a more substantial romantic obstacle than the contrived miscommunications that foil Marianne and Connell – can feel anachronistic: its plausibility relies on a somewhat old-fashioned sense of propriety and her village’s small-town atmosphere.
Yet imperfections and excesses are easy to forgive when they are the consequence of enlarged ambitions, pursued with considerable technical dexterity. A skilful observer of self-conscious characters, Rooney is herself a self-conscious novelist – inevitably, given the magnitude of her celebrity. That self-consciousness was decidedly mismanaged in Beautiful World, which made self-consciousness a theme but was nonetheless marred by it: Alice, a wealthy, famous novelist, worries that she is producing light entertainments rather than doing good in the world. Past reviewers noted the discrepancy between the radical self-styling of Rooney’s characters and her conventional romance plots. Rooney – a “lifelong Marxist” – seems to have shared these concerns, but her new book may reveal an evolution of that view: that any air of frivolousness wafting off her early work was not because it wasn’t anti-capitalist enough but because the human questions were somewhat shallow; there wasn’t an awful lot at stake.
With Intermezzo, Rooney has tried to deepen her fiction, and has thrown herself at her task with enough conviction and skill to exorcise the initial self-consciousness that accompanies so conspicuous a departure. In doing so, she earns the liberties she takes, making good use of the freedoms afforded by extreme success, including the freedom to be a bit less remarkable. For Intermezzo is a less distinctive, less sui generis novel than what came before, closer to something that someone else might have written. Yet it is also a weightier one. For those who miss the fireworks, a question for the future is whether Rooney can advance without renouncing, combine depth and style, intimacy and control, meat and juice (with maybe a bit more salt, and a touch less syrup): can surrender herself without repudiating herself, take risks while still playing to her strengths.
Intermezzo
Sally Rooney
Faber & Faber, 448pp, £20
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[See also: From Rachel Kushner to Mark Rowlands: new books reviewed in short]
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