Sally Rooney’s New Novel, Intermezzo, Is Her Longest and Best Reflection on “Idiotic Lust and Love” Yet

On a thematic level, Irish writer Sally Rooney is definitely in her element in her new novel Intermezzo. We find Peter and Ivan Koubek, who have just lost their father and are trying to create a life for themselves through and beyond that grief through intimate relationships.

Peter, a lawyer in his 30s, is entangled in a semi-secret arrangement with a much younger college student and former sex worker, Naomi. He balances this with his long-term and largely chaste relationship with his former long-term girlfriend, Sylvia.

Ivan, a decade younger and far less affable than his older brother, had meanwhile become involved with Margaret, a 36-year-old woman he met while playing chess in Leitrim, a county in north-west Ireland.

So far, so familiar. Anyone looking for fiction without Rooney’s romantic streak should know better by now.

The minor stylistic differences between Intermezzo and the author’s other books, noted by reviewers, are tempered by the clear continuity in Rooney’s interests as an author.

We read Rooney because she is an extraordinary writer whose characters raise serious and enduring questions about the specific historical, social, and economic moments in which they live. Her characters manage to do so without ever feeling like anything less than fully developed, psychologically complex individuals.

In Conversations with Friends and Normal People, the breakdown of young relationships and first love tested characters’ ideologies against their behaviors, their politics against their morals. In Beautiful World, email gave Alice and Eileen a space to describe what it was like to live in a moment of historical crisis, even as life (in alternating chapters) went on as usual.

This tension, typical of Rooney, is portrayed in “Intermezzo” as a sibling battle, with Peter criticizing Ivan’s differing views and Ivan accusing Peter of putting principles above behavior.

Ivan believes that “Peter is the type of person who moves very fluidly on the surface of life.” For the record, this is not reflected at all in Peter’s internal monologue, which runs through cut-off fragments of sentences and is interspersed with wishes that he were no longer alive.

Life, for Peter, seems to be getting closer and more claustrophobic, given the seemingly total clarity with which he remembers “When Life Was Perfect.” He immediately envies and feels deep sympathy for those whose lives are constantly plagued by the material forces from which his well-paid job protects him.

Ivan has at various points felt like he exists outside of life. He can eloquently explain his views on the late capitalist economy (a fake), has a degree in physics, a stellar reputation for competitive chess, and a history of subscribing to questionable YouTube channels with a distinctly incel bent. But in Ivan we see Rooney’s great optimism about people and how they can be redeemed.

Ivan often faces the difficulties of paying rent, of living in a world where one cannot do something as mundane as owning a dog. But these difficulties are tempered by the feeling that the world is, after all, beginning to open up to him. Surely, he muses, it is better to face this “endless struggle” with optimism than to let it break him. When he meets Margaret, he feels increasingly certain that the world is indeed “making room for kindness and decency.”

This latest book is perhaps Rooney’s most mature reflection on how relationships function as exercises in optimism, both toward each other and toward the world itself. Intermezzo is extraordinary and refreshing in its account of the exchange of promises that takes place in relationships, the currency of hope on which they are based, and the mutual, voluntary emotional debts they create. These debts, of course, are not always repaid, and that is part of the point: the stakes of love are high, and we risk defaulting and being defaulted.

And yet, for Rooney, the risk is always worth taking. It has to be, because that’s all there is. Rooney is a world where relationships sustain us, and small, everyday miracles make life seem more bearable than it should be. It can be something as simple as the mindless care of a daily chore like “making (a) boxed lunch, Nutella sandwiches, apple wrapped in kitchen paper” for someone else, or the irrational amount of love a dog shows its owner after they’ve been gone.

As with each of her previous novels, Rooney’s strength as a writer is in focusing attention on the wild hope we place in other people’s ability to sustain us, and the anxiety we feel about what we might offer in return. And despite any suggestion of departure, this is a major point of continuity throughout Rooney’s work.

Rooney seems to share the views of many of her characters. Like Frances in Conversations with Friends, who says, “

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