Fintan O’Toole: The relationship between two brothers, Peter and Ivan, is at the heart of your new novel Intermezzo, and it’s a relationship that almost has a sort of mythic dimension to it, going back to Cain and Abel. I wondered when it occurred to you that that was a book you wanted to write.
Sally Rooney: I would be telling a lie if I said I had any of that on my mind when I started writing about these guys! The idea for this book came to me when I imagined a simultaneous exhibition game, which is where an accomplished chess player, maybe a grandmaster, plays a lot of different players all at once. I had this idea for a game like that happening in a small-town arts centre in the west of Ireland, and that a woman who worked there would be watching this young man [Ivan] play this chess, and I found that idea captivating. So I wrote that scene, and then I started wondering about the rest of the characters’ lives, where they were coming from and how they’d reached the point where they met each other, and I wrote quite a bit about them, and then kind of got stuck. Then, I had this moment of realisation that Ivan had an older brother, and immediately it was like, “Now I know that I have to write a novel.” Peter kind of completed the picture for me, and from that point, I knew that I would have to write about brothers.
The overarching emotion that we get into very quickly in the book is grief. It’s something that turns up a lot in your work. Is it that grief is maybe the hardest of all emotions to pin down, because it’s overwhelming and yet incredibly difficult for characters to articulate what it means to them?
The epigraph to the book is from Wittgenstein: “Aren’t you feeling grief now, but aren’t you now playing chess?” Chess is something you’re either doing or you’re not. Grief is very complex – it exists in the weave of life, and to pin it down in a moment-to-moment way is very difficult, and these characters spend a lot of the book trying to figure out what the grief they’re feeling is, and what form it takes in their lives. I think that as soon as I realised that Ivan had a brother, that’s the point where I realised that they were grieving for a parent, and that became the incitement for their relationship to enter a new phase, which is characterised by a rush of almost violent anger towards one another, but also a desire to become closer to one another.
Death is there, because death is there in life – it’s the overhanging question, and maybe as my characters get older and I get older, those questions become more alive for them and more experientially lived in, rather than just abstract and philosophical. I think ultimately, as a writer, you can’t be interested in writing about life if you’re not conscious of death as being the inevitable, and the thing that makes life precious.
A phrase that comes to mind with your work is “patriarchy without the patriarch”: the structures are still there, but there are no patriarchs in your work; the fathers are absent. This tension runs through your fiction: the inherited forms that tell us how we’re supposed to live are no longer working, they’re absent in some way.
It makes me think of Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” I feel that so much about the moment that we’re in, where our social structures, including the capitalist structure that exerts its pressure on every facet of our lives, are not fit for purpose, and yet, they’re still there! So there’s this sense of grappling with social forms, including, of course, patriarchy, that linger on when they’ve exhausted any kind of consensus belief that they have some utility. We want to move beyond them but we’re trapped in a social and cultural moment where we can’t quite transcend them. As a novelist, what I’m interested in is: how does that make people feel, and what kind of pressure does that exert on the business of living? I think that struggle and that feeling of entrapment is there in all my work.
[See also: “Intermezzo review”: Sally Rooney’s adventures in style]
Is one of those forms the novel itself? One of the fascinating things for readers is the way in which you grapple with this question of how does this form, which emerged in the 18th century, still work?
I’m really kind of obsessed with the novel form. It emerges sort of coincident with the advent of industrial capitalism, and it’s a bourgeois form: it gives voice to a new kind of individualism that is associated with the eruption of capitalism and the new social structure that is attendant on that; the new psychologies, if you like. The individual was invented, in a way, along with that economic structure, and then along with the novel form. And it, throughout its history, has been a fascinating document of the psychology of the individual within the capitalist system.
Is it still a bourgeois form that we’re now just play-acting? We’re putting on the costume of the 18th-century novel but we’re making our characters send text messages and stuff so that we know it’s supposed to be contemporary? I would hope not: I think the novel still has a lot to say, and part of the evidence for that – I hope this doesn’t sound naive – is that people still read them. I don’t think it is an exhausted form, not only because I love The Brothers Karamazov and The Golden Bowl and Ulysses, but also because I love novels that are published in the here and now. The novel emerged to accommodate subjectivity under the extreme changes brought about by the capitalist system, and perhaps it can still do that for us today.
We as novelists have to struggle and try and find a way for it to do that; to be genuinely contemporary while still engaging in that textual history which is still so alive and present to us. In a way, this book came out of partly my reading of Ulysses, my love for that book, and also my sense that it demanded a response: it was like, “Oh, this is such a gigantic question mark over the form of the novel; how do I come up with some kind of provisional answer to that question? Not a definitive one, but here’s my attempt.”
I also think that part of what’s so special about the novel form is because the fiction of the novel feels very real. When you read a really good novel, you feel as if you are in that world, living that life with those characters – or at least, that is how I feel – and so the fictitiousness of the novel is very particular: it’s historically specific but it is also kind of psychologically specific. It may be naive realism, but it appeals to a sense of: “I know these people. I feel like I’m living this life.” And that, to me, is the magic of it. When I’m writing my book, I genuinely believe in these people – and whether I succeed in communicating that on the page or I fail, that’s the criteria on which I can be judged. Of course, I’ve read postmodern theory and I know that’s all made up! But they’re not just textual artefacts; they feel like something to me, real like a dream is real.
Trinity College Dublin features heavily in the work, and Bishop Berkeley, who came from there, famously said, “To be is to be perceived.” In different ways, the characters in Intermezzo are all struggling with the question of whether we need other people to validate and recognise our relationships in order for us to really believe in them ourselves.
Very much so. I’m persistently really interested in the difficulty of integrating intimate life into social life. If you look at, say, Austen, so much of the narrative momentum comes from the fact that the romantic – and of course the erotic – is totally suppressed from language: it can’t be discussed openly. The only way in which it can be acknowledged is through the marriage plot, and so that act of suppression is part of the drive of those novels. We know that the characters are attracted to one another, but it all has to remain within the boundaries of the late 18th-, early 19th-century novel, that form of language. Of course, that all was exploded with modernism, and now you can write anything: you can put all kinds of swearwords into your books and you’re allowed to say whatever you want. But that creates a problem for the novelist, because it’s like, “Oh, now where does my narrative drive come from? Nothing is excluded from the text of a novel, so where’s that subterranean push coming from?”
Part of it in my work is relationships that can’t smoothly be integrated into social life, so they remain beyond the parameters of language. And, of course, now language has started to catch up, so people talk about “situationships” and things like this: we are beginning to develop a vocabulary for relationships that aren’t quite integrated into social life. But nonetheless, those difficulties persist: even if you have like an uncomfortable, slippery category like situationship, still, that doesn’t get rid of all the problems, there’s still that friction between social life and intimate life: where does that relationship fit? I am really interested in that slippage, and it gives a drive to narratives and scenes when I explore that kind of friction.
A lot of the relationships I’m really interested in seem to be lacking any fixed terminology: they can’t quite be pinned down by any definition, and that makes the people in them very uncomfortable. It’s like they imagine themselves being in a social situation and saying, “Well, you know, this is…” and they lack the term to introduce this person in relation to themselves. There is a desire to hold on to privacy, to intimate life, and almost to sequester that from the prying eyes of the outside world, but there is also a love of community and social life, a desire to belong and to be part of that, and that entails being perceived, and making one’s life legible to others. That is what these characters consistently struggle with: they don’t want to make themselves legible, or they desperately want to but can’t.
Here we have Ivan, in his early twenties, in a relationship with a woman in her thirties, and Peter, in his thirties, in a relationship with a woman in her early twenties. Is the attraction of that for you as a storyteller that there’s still a social tension around relationships that do not seem age-appropriate?
I think there’s a social friction there, and it’s not just age differences. When I look at my work, what stands out is that I’m persistently interested in power imbalances or social imbalances: that can be class divisions, or it could be age, it could be wealth or an imbalance in terms of gendered power, which is common in heterosexual relationships. What I’m really interested in is trying to write about characters who are in relationships that are very important to them, but which are characterised by a state of disequilibrium in some way. I mean, when I look at Normal People, so much of it came down to who’s popular in school, which seems like such a nothing thing, but of course, when you’re in school, it can be everything. So there’s a sense that even that level of disequilibrium – which can feel like one grain of rice in the weighing scales – can still feel like a lot, and enough to create a kind of ineluctable friction between those inner and outer worlds, the social and the intimate world. And I think that’s probably why I return to those thematics: I’m interested in relationships that are intense, in which the characters really care about each other. Those are kind of the only relationships that I like to write about. But in order to be interesting and to work in a novel, they have to be characterised by some kind of imbalance that’s driving the novel on – you know, if you have a loving couple who are perfectly well matched and their friends all think they’re great for each other, you’re not going to get 600 pages out of it!
There’s so much bad writing about sex, but you write about it with extraordinary precision and tenderness. How difficult is that to do?
It’s not easy, and it does feel like a bit of a tightrope walk. And sometimes I say to myself, like, “Can’t I just begin the paragraph with ‘Afterwards…’?” It would save me a lot of embarrassment! But because in my work I want to be attendant to the specificities of the kinds of intimacy these characters are engaged in – and I want readers to feel, like I feel, really invested in how these characters are going to remain or not remain in each other’s lives – that means I have to go with them into moments where modesty would suggest I defer. And I am conscious that people love making fun of bad sex scenes in novels, and I’m sure that the same has happened and will happen to me, and that’s fine. I want that aspect of the characters’ lives – their existence as sexual beings, which, you know, almost all adults are – which can be so rich and important, to come alive for the reader, and if that means causing myself a lot of embarrassment, that’s a minor concern. So I just have to do it.
I think it’s true that until you there has been no other major novelist in Ireland that is as free of religion as burden, as institutional terror – and so it’s possible for your characters to think about religion in a new way. It’s not so much about doctrine, or even necessarily belief, but the idea that in religious forms some kind of beauty, hope or transcendence of this brutal, capitalistic world might be possible.
I think certainly the forms persist, and one of the points of contention between the brothers is that Peter gave the eulogy at the father’s funeral, which was a religious service, and Ivan did not. I am very interested in the kind of community life that is embodied in those rituals – especially death and grieving rituals, so many of which are still steeped in Catholic institutional ceremony.
I don’t think it’s mentioned, but it’s presumed that all of my characters received a Catholic primary and secondary education, so the sense of the Catholic institution and the kind of entanglement of official religion with our state institutions is there as the backdrop, because it couldn’t not be: that is the country that we inhabit, and the state formation that we’re left with after the turbulence of the 20th century.
My characters are also interested in religion philosophically: they’re interested in asking questions about theology, about the meaning of life, as many of us are. I am interested in what appears to be the almost complete disappearance of religion and religious faith within a few generations of human history. That’s unprecedented, and it’s a fascinating, rapid cultural shift that institutionally we haven’t caught up with. Philosophically, culturally, so much of the textual lineage that we inherit is immersed in religious faith, and we inherit those texts now in a very different cultural position. Among my demographic, religious belief is rare, and I think that’s reflected generally in statistics. How and why did that happen? How did we end up in this position?
I am really interested in the sort of absence that that’s created – in terms of this rich cultural textual inheritance missing what sometimes seems to be its central feature, which in our tradition maybe is Christ, certainly in more general terms, God. That figure has gone, and so much was arranged around it that’s now arranged around an absence or a void.
I think my characters probably have that in common with me. They’re interested in thinking about God: where did God go? And is there something to be retrieved there? I think that’s something that they want to think about in their own lives, from different perspectives, and I have written about characters who are practising religious believers, characters who would say they have some faith in something – and you might call that something God – and characters who have no religious belief whatsoever. So I am interested in teasing that out: it seems like an interesting little philosophical, sociological kind of puzzle, and I certainly haven’t finished thinking about it yet.
“Intermezzo” is published by Faber & Faber. This is an edited version of a conversation that took place on 21 September at the National Concert Hall in Dublin
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, All-out war