Early in Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo, one of the central characters — Peter, a 32-year-old lawyer in Dublin — finds himself weeping in the street some weeks after his father’s death. “He didn’t know the first thing about me, Sylvia,” he tells his ex-girlfriend, when she consolingly hands him a tissue, “Never had a real conversation in our lives.” “Life isn’t just talking, you know,” she replies. It’s a cryptic remark but one that reaches into the heart of this keenly intelligent book about brothers, lovers, relationships and what it might mean to lean on others.
Intermezzo sees Rooney return to exceptional form with a novel as clever as her 2017 debut Conversations with Friends, and as engrossing as its 2018 follow-up Normal People. This time, though, Rooney’s familiarly formidable female leads (the whip-smart Frances and Bobbi of Conversations with Friends, and Eileen and Alice in 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You?) are exchanged for a pair of brothers: Peter and Ivan. Having drifted apart, they suddenly find themselves summoned together by grief.
Peter is a human rights lawyer with a background in philosophy — a not inconsequential detail in a novel that begins with an epigraph from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1953 Philosophical Investigations. Like Wittgenstein, Rooney seems to be contending with the question of whether private experiences — like grief and pain — are as private as they seem, and asking how they might be understood by others.
In Intermezzo, Peter is in pain. Although he “likes to convey to the world at large a genial disposition”, he suffers from an inner anguish so lacerating that he compulsively self-medicates with alcohol and tranquillisers. To his younger brother Ivan, “Peter is the kind of person who goes along the surface of life very smoothly. He talks on the phone a lot and eats in restaurants and says that schools of philosophy have been refuted.” But Rooney’s omniscient authorial voice opens up what Ivan cannot see: terrible intrusive thoughts, suicidal ideation and self-revulsion.
Ivan, by contrast, is, in Peter’s eyes, a “curio”, an “oddball”, “kind of autistic”. At 23, he is a fading chess prodigy whose early promise remains unrealised. At their father’s wake, Peter watches him “loitering miserably alone at the table of sandwiches”. He wears a poorly fitted suit, but Ivan himself senses “his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.” It’s a curiously tender formulation and Rooney makes us warm to the very strangeness that so puzzles Peter. When Ivan unexpectedly forms a serious relationship with an older woman named Margaret, the brothers fall out and earlier resentments and recriminations resurface.
In his own romantic life, Peter agonises between devotion to Sylvia — an elegant academic who struggles with chronic pain — and infatuation with Naomi, a young college student who “[spends] his money on ketamine and eyelash extensions”. Beyond this conflict between the brothers, nothing much else happens. And yet what Rooney offers instead is enough: characters rendered in a kind of literary pointillism, interiorities that feel so real they vibrate, inwardness turned utterly out. In Intermezzo, her usually spare style meets something more impressionistic. Internal monologue, often ungrammatical, almost staccato, merges with external dialogue, sliding between sensation, quotation and conversation, forming a picture of an inner life that is persuasive and eminently readable.
It’s a technique that also allows Rooney to show how close to the surface sorrow lies. Socialising with work colleagues, Peter laughs at a joke. Inwardly, he is distracted by a spelling error on a menu, remembers lines from Hamlet and contemplates suicide: “How weary, stale, flat and profitable. Gary wants to know is he around, get a drink, dinner. Naomi texts him: plans tonight? To go on like this, just for the sake of other people, and anyway who. . . Gary is telling an anecdote about the Workplace Relations Commission. Broccolli. For Ivan, probably, he thinks in the end. Couldn’t do it to him, in reality.” It’s a sequence of thought, with its connections and non sequiturs, composed with consummate skill.
If there’s weakness to the novel, it may be in the depiction of the subsidiary female characters: the saintly Sylvia, who — slender, plain and bookish — feels cast in the mould of a recognisably Rooney-esque heroine, and the blithe Naomi, complete with nose stud and a risqué social media account, who teeters a little too closely to a Gen Z variation of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
With Margaret, though, who is in her mid-thirties and restarting her life after a failed marriage, Rooney points us to something deeper about the nature of relationships. Margaret understands how tentatively love forms, and the various recalibrations each party might make to sustain it. It’s Margaret who senses “that the day she met Ivan, they brought into existence a new relationship, which is also a way of being”.
Love, as Rooney depicts it here, is a moral proposition, complete with obligations for solicitude and responsibility. When Wittgenstein contests the idea that our feelings and sensations are unshareable, he also prompts us to confront the undeniable ways we are connected to others. We lean on others as they do us. As Margaret puts it: “The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.” More Rooney, too, please.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney Faber £20, 448 pages/Farrar, Straus and Giroux $29, 432 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
