{"id":467753,"date":"2024-10-08T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-08T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/?p=467753"},"modified":"2024-10-07T18:00:08","modified_gmt":"2024-10-07T17:00:08","slug":"sally-rooney-intermezzo-god-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/culture\/books\/2024\/10\/sally-rooney-intermezzo-god-complex","title":{"rendered":"Intermezzo\u2019s God complex"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>\u201cSometimes I just have a feeling. Like a sense of being loved by God, almost\u2026 Like when I\u2019m with you.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">I<em>ntermezzo<\/em>, the fourth book by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/tag\/sally-rooney\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sally Rooney<\/a> \u2013 the caustic kingpin of millennial fiction \u2013 has sailed with elegant inevitability to the top of the bestseller list. Yet fans of Rooney\u2019s poker-faced poised style may be surprised to realise that while her previous works flirted with faith, her new novel is unabashedly religious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While typically Rooneyish in silhouette \u2013 a cluster of nerdy, attractive Dubliners become emotionally and sexually enmeshed \u2013<em> Intermezzo<\/em> is full of sincere (if, like, youthfully expressed) declarations of faith. Ivan, a chess pro whose braces can\u2019t quite conceal his sexual magnetism, senses divine influence while playing (\u201cIt\u2019s like the order is so deep\u2026 there must be something underneath it all\u201d), 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 \u201cfaintly golden\u201d hair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rooney has written about religion before: in her previous novel, <em>Beautiful World, Where Are You<\/em> (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\u2019s inevitable that the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/tag\/catholic-church\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Catholic church<\/a> casts a shadow across the page: Rooney was forged in an Ireland only just emerging from the clasps of Rome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><strong>[See also: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/culture\/books\/book-of-the-day\/2024\/09\/sally-rooney-adventures-in-style-intermezzo-review\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sally Rooney\u2019s adventures in style<\/a>]<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While Rooney rejected the Church\u2019s teachings as a teenager, she recently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/culture\/books\/2024\/09\/14\/sally-rooney-there-is-something-christian-about-my-work-even-if-i-would-not-describe-myself-as-religious\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">told the <em>Irish Times<\/em><\/a> that \u201cit would be dishonest of me to say [Catholicism] isn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Given Rooney\u2019s 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<em> Intermezzo<\/em> arrives at a moment in which Catholicism has become trendy. In recent years, Catholic imagery has sprouted up through social media \u2013 in half-mocking memes, fashion brands (see the oft-Instagrammed \u201cHoly Trinity\u201d bikini, which comes emblazoned with the words \u201cFather\u201d and \u201cSon\u201d), and pop lyrics. In Charli XCX\u2019s summer-storming album, <em>Brat<\/em>, a sardonic young woman smokes and snorts even as she\u2019s \u201cfingering a gold cross\u201d. Naomi, <em>Intermezzo<\/em>\u2019s 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\u2019s funeral, she asks, \u201cWhat did you think I was going to do?\u2026 Try to seduce the priest?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet unlike most of the internet,<em> Intermezzo<\/em> is not cynical. The protagonists, who we are clearly supposed to like (\u201cThe more time I spent with them\u2026 the more sympathy I felt,\u201d Rooney told the <em>New Yorker<\/em> in July), wrestle with faith through their passion for one another. Grief-gnawed Peter, contemplating self-destruction, defies his deity: \u201cNothing can force me to endure what I hate\u2026 not even God. Just try and you\u2019ll see.\u201d Yet ten pages later we find his faith at least partially restored: he lies in the lap of his lover, still alive, enjoying a \u201csudden proliferation of grace\u201d. I don\u2019t know whether Rooney believes in God \u2013 but <em>Intermezzo<\/em> certainly seems to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In artistic terms, this is a problem. Why? As the critic Ian Watt argued in his influential 1957 book, <em>The Rise of the Novel<\/em>, the novel was incubated in the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy, which shifted the balance of moral responsibility from the Church towards the individual\u2019s 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 (\u201cNOOO, Charlotte, don\u2019t marry repulsive Mr Collins!\u201d). A secular society needs fiction more urgently than a pious one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Consider the spiritual career of George Eliot, a major influence on Rooney (whose second novel, <em>Normal People<\/em>, begins with a quote from <em>Daniel Deronda<\/em>). 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 \u201cextending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot\u201d. The Bible instructs us to love our neighbours \u2013 but in a world of spiritual uncertainty, readers must rely on fiction to convince us that other people matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The characters in Rooney\u2019s early novels certainly mattered to me \u2013 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. <em>Normal People<\/em>, in particular, manages a tension between sarcasm and sentiment that mirrors the emotional experience of being 20. But Rooney\u2019s increasing interest in religion has begun to cloud her prose. Her two most recent novels \u2013 despite some wonderful, wise writing about the human heart \u2013 skew soppy. At one point in<em> Intermezzo<\/em>, Margaret looks at Ivan and feels overcome by his \u201csensitivity to beauty in inanimate objects\u201d. I mean, sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The characters see each other in the flattering, flattening light of God. Sex is never awkward or boring but always \u201cbeautiful, perfect\u201d. Relationships are anguished and interrupted but don\u2019t turn stale. Instead, they are constantly idealised: we see Peter\u2019s youthful love affair with a pre-injury Sylvia in flashbacks so rosy they verge on sunburned: \u201cLying naked with her chin in her hand, reading poetry.\u201d Perhaps Rooney meant us to laugh at the nostalgia but honestly, it isn\u2019t funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perfect people and flawless relationships belong in heaven, not fiction. Religion has made <em>Intermezzo<\/em> too stained-glass-smooth to be really interesting, its characters\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><strong>[See also: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/culture\/books\/2024\/09\/sally-rooney-interview-were-trapped-cultural-moment\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sally Rooney interview: \u201cWe\u2019re trapped in a cultural moment\u201d<\/a>]<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Religion has made Sally Rooney boring. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17155,"featured_media":467785,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5093,784,5079],"class_list":["post-467753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-culture","category-religion"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v21.1 (Yoast SEO v21.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Sally Rooney: Intermezzo\u2019s God complex - 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