“Sometimes I just have a feeling. Like a sense of being loved by God, almost… Like when I’m with you.”
Intermezzo, the fourth book by Sally Rooney – the caustic kingpin of millennial fiction – has sailed with elegant inevitability to the top of the bestseller list. Yet fans of Rooney’s poker-faced poised style may be surprised to realise that while her previous works flirted with faith, her new novel is unabashedly religious.
While typically Rooneyish in silhouette – a cluster of nerdy, attractive Dubliners become emotionally and sexually enmeshed – Intermezzo is full of sincere (if, like, youthfully expressed) declarations of faith. Ivan, a chess pro whose braces can’t quite conceal his sexual magnetism, senses divine influence while playing (“It’s like the order is so deep… there must be something underneath it all”), while his older girlfriend, Margaret, wonders if their relationship is a literally-God-sent chance to expiate the mistakes of a previous marriage. Meanwhile, literature professor Sylvia, horribly (but invisibly) injured in a car accident, embodies a kind of Jesus/Virgin Mary mash-up, with her suffering, her celibacy, and her halo of “faintly golden” hair.
Rooney has written about religion before: in her previous novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (a postlapsarian howl of a title, if ever I heard one), for instance, a character takes his Saturday night conquest along to Sunday mass. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the Catholic church casts a shadow across the page: Rooney was forged in an Ireland only just emerging from the clasps of Rome.
[See also: Sally Rooney’s adventures in style]
While Rooney rejected the Church’s teachings as a teenager, she recently told the Irish Times that “it would be dishonest of me to say [Catholicism] isn’t central to who I am as a thinker and as a writer. There is something Christian about my work, even if I would not describe myself as straightforwardly religious.”
Given Rooney’s talent for flexing the language of the internet around the awkward 19th-century corners of the novel, it is not coincidental that the transubstantiation tang of Intermezzo arrives at a moment in which Catholicism has become trendy. In recent years, Catholic imagery has sprouted up through social media – in half-mocking memes, fashion brands (see the oft-Instagrammed “Holy Trinity” bikini, which comes emblazoned with the words “Father” and “Son”), and pop lyrics. In Charli XCX’s summer-storming album, Brat, a sardonic young woman smokes and snorts even as she’s “fingering a gold cross”. Naomi, Intermezzo’s most conventionally Gen-Z character, has a slightly flirty relationship with the Church. When she discovers that her boyfriend Peter failed to invite her to his father’s funeral, she asks, “What did you think I was going to do?… Try to seduce the priest?”
Yet unlike most of the internet, Intermezzo is not cynical. The protagonists, who we are clearly supposed to like (“The more time I spent with them… the more sympathy I felt,” Rooney told the New Yorker in July), wrestle with faith through their passion for one another. Grief-gnawed Peter, contemplating self-destruction, defies his deity: “Nothing can force me to endure what I hate… not even God. Just try and you’ll see.” Yet ten pages later we find his faith at least partially restored: he lies in the lap of his lover, still alive, enjoying a “sudden proliferation of grace”. I don’t know whether Rooney believes in God – but Intermezzo certainly seems to.
In artistic terms, this is a problem. Why? As the critic Ian Watt argued in his influential 1957 book, The Rise of the Novel, the novel was incubated in the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy, which shifted the balance of moral responsibility from the Church towards the individual’s conscience. Novels only make sense in a world of ethical autonomy in which characters are free to make consequential choices and readers to judge them for it (“NOOO, Charlotte, don’t marry repulsive Mr Collins!”). A secular society needs fiction more urgently than a pious one.
Consider the spiritual career of George Eliot, a major influence on Rooney (whose second novel, Normal People, begins with a quote from Daniel Deronda). Fervently religious, Eliot woke up one Sunday, aged 22, and refused to go to Church. Doubting her faith, she turned instead to fiction to construct an ethical architecture: art, she wrote, is a mode of “extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot”. The Bible instructs us to love our neighbours – but in a world of spiritual uncertainty, readers must rely on fiction to convince us that other people matter.
The characters in Rooney’s early novels certainly mattered to me – partly because, like real people, they so often withheld or misunderstood their feelings. This gave the occasional moments when the dry, imperturbable surface of her prose cracked open to release real feelings. Normal People, in particular, manages a tension between sarcasm and sentiment that mirrors the emotional experience of being 20. But Rooney’s increasing interest in religion has begun to cloud her prose. Her two most recent novels – despite some wonderful, wise writing about the human heart – skew soppy. At one point in Intermezzo, Margaret looks at Ivan and feels overcome by his “sensitivity to beauty in inanimate objects”. I mean, sure.
The characters see each other in the flattering, flattening light of God. Sex is never awkward or boring but always “beautiful, perfect”. Relationships are anguished and interrupted but don’t turn stale. Instead, they are constantly idealised: we see Peter’s youthful love affair with a pre-injury Sylvia in flashbacks so rosy they verge on sunburned: “Lying naked with her chin in her hand, reading poetry.” Perhaps Rooney meant us to laugh at the nostalgia but honestly, it isn’t funny.
Perfect people and flawless relationships belong in heaven, not fiction. Religion has made Intermezzo too stained-glass-smooth to be really interesting, its characters’ struggles too easily resolved by the benign, protective hand of the novelist-God. Toppled by the weight of their own virtue, they lie limply on the page.
[See also: Sally Rooney interview: “We’re trapped in a cultural moment”]
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