On Tuesday 24th September, the latest novel by Sally Rooney, Intermezzo, hit the shelves in bookshops nationwide. The launch day saw queues in front of bookshops before they opened, and Rooney was in the media spotlight for her reiterated, unequivocal support for Palestine in a recent public appearance. Now used to her writing style and topics of interest, her audience received this latest novel, Rooney’s fourth.
Intermezzo is a novel about two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek. Ivan is a young competitive chess player who enters a relationship with an older woman; Peter is a human rights lawyer who struggles with his relationships with two women. The relationships of the Koubek brothers with women shape one of the novel’s layers of emotional and dramatic conflict; another is that of their own relationship, and their struggling sense of kinship. Early on in the novel, clear references and allusions anchor us in the present moment in Dublin and Ireland. Naomi, a college student and one of the women Peter maintains relationship with, lives in a squat somewhere near Dublin’s James St, faces an illegal eviction notice, and eventually gets arrested during an illegal eviction by private security. Peter and Sylvia, the other woman in his life, are members of the local tenants union (implied to be CATU, Community Action Tenants Union).
While the eviction is a relatively major event in the book, Rooney’s social critique and sense for reality goes well beyond housing crisis. Her characters struggle with physical and mental health, prejudice and alienation. The characters also learn, overcome their past misconceptions, and grow while material conditions change and put them into new relations. In an examination of what is seen as a normative relationship in today’s Ireland, both men’s relationship with women, and the relationship between themselves, are put into focus in the novel.
Traditionally, Rooney’s characters struggle with communication. Often it is the male characters who seem not to have the skill or the experience to communicate clearly in an emotional context. In the case of this novel’s male protagonists, we once again see this flaw demonstrated. This alienates them from their partners and their own internal emotional processes.
Rooney’s characters think about their identities, and recognise the nuances in those: they recognise what is salient, and what is fluent, where power lies and where exploitation lurks. Their relationships with labour and money are interesting and characteristic of the dilemmas of young people today. From the gig economy to sex work, the ethics of working for large companies and complicity in societal crises, characters in Intermezzo navigate through the neoliberal landscape of Dublin with some understanding of the complexity the relations of production put upon them. They also traverse the literal, physical landscape of Dublin in a way satisfying for the reader: Rooney is good at giving enough detail for those acquainted with Dublin’s streets to reconstruct the paths of the protagonists, while still not putting the burden on less familiar readers to keep any track of them. Similarly, Rooney’s writing voice seamlessly and effortlessly adapts to her protagonists and we get sentences whose structure and pacing mirror the mental and emotional state of characters in the scene at hand. Style varies bravely.
Intermezzo is as contemporary as it gets: one point in time referred to in the book is a Sporting Lisbon versus Tottenham Hotspur game which took place in October 2022, placing the story in the very recent past, with fleeting reference made to Covid-19 as well. As such, it opens questions that we are still not ready to close, individually and collectively. Rooney’s prose is captivating, shot
through with her own original innovations and an immensely rich intertextuality. It is a delight to read her notes at the end of the book, citing all the literary references peppered through the novel; well chosen and perfectly blended, these are nods to the rich cultural past she skilfully navigates as a writer.
Intermezzo is probably Rooney’s best novel yet.
Intermezzo is available to buy in Connolly Books https://www.connollybooks.org/product/intermezzo
