Aoife McGowan reviews internationally acclaimed novelist Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo
If one was to form a picture of the themes and characters typically explored in Sally Rooney’s novels from the popular online critiques of her work, Intermezzo would seem a world of difference. Thin, white, privileged, sad-girl stories are the most common misreading thrown about in these amateur literary discourse circles; where Normal People is about miscommunication, and Conversations With Friends is about champagne socialists, or grooming, and both of them glorifying eating disorders. Even published critique of Rooney falls into these traps of over-simplification for the purpose of misinterpretation, where her books are derided alongside a slate of other contemporary authors who often have nothing in common beyond being women under the age of 40.
In reality, Intermezzo is Rooney doing what she knows best, better than ever before: observing how relationships develop under neoliberalism, and what, if anything, can save the people in them from succumbing.
In alternating perspectives we follow two brothers navigating their grief, and their desire to connect with one another, through their relationships with women. The novel is both ideologically and stylistically stronger than her previous work, and accomplishes this through its embrace of specificity in setting.
The Koubek brothers are the children of 21st Century Ireland. Half-Slovak children of divorce living in the precarious private rental market, these are Irish experiences that have not yet been addressed in our national canon. The Celtic Tiger moved Ireland from a net-emigration to a net-migration country, saw the legalisation of divorce, and the decline in power and influence of the Church. In Rooney’s own words: “free market ideology has replaced Catholic ideology.”
Peter is a successful lawyer and part-time lecturer in his early thirties. He has a nice life for Dublin standards– a decade into his career and he’s still renting– but over the course of the novel we see that he struggles with, at times violent, depression. An unstable sense of self, he is constantly battling his identity and upbringing to achieve professional conformity. Rooney translates his outbursts of emotional distress onto the page through a Joycean stream of consciousness.
Peter becomes blinded with self-loathing and regret as he struggles to reconcile his growing feelings for the much younger Naomi with the life he had imagined for himself before Sylvia’s accident and their subsequent breakup. Pushing and retreating from the limits of romantic, platonic, and paternal love, Peter is stumbling through life a few non-prescription Xanax at a time.
Ivan is a semi-unemployed recent graduate and ageing-out chess prodigy. In the weeks after his father’s funeral, we follow as he forms his first real, adult relationship with Margaret. A few years Peter’s senior, they met through her role as the events coordinator at an arts centre in her Leitrim town, hosting Ivan for a chess exhibition and workshop. They stumble into loving one another a weekend visit at a time, both trying to make the mismatched puzzle pieces of their lives fit together.
These chapters are standard Rooney prose, a balance from the increasingly experimental choices in Peter’s storyline.
Ivan is unprepared to deal with the complicated reality of Margaret’s life: in the process of a divorce, conflict with her siblings over financially supporting their ageing mother, and the potential social consequences of dating a 22-year-old blow-in. However, it is Ivan’s detachment from social norms that allow him to stumble his way into tenderness, into love, into life itself.
Chronic illness touches every character in Intermezzo, physical manifestations of the alienation that forty-odd years of Irish neoliberalism has bred into us. Both Margaret’s almost ex-husband and Naomi’s mother are addicts, Peter himself is recreationally using prescription tranquilisers, and Sylvia’s is in chronic pain from an accident in her mid-twenties. Her use of illness as allegory is similar to Frances’ endometriosis in Conversations With Friends, functioning as punishment for the character’s self-imposed repression: the illness reflects the emotions our character refuses to process.
Rooney’s Ireland has a terminal case of late capitalism, and Intermezzo posits the cure: to choose complicated relationships, to choose mistakes and try agains, to choose love.