Sally Rooney deserves credit for not sticking to safe formulas. Her first three novels made her an international literary celebrity, her book launches adorned with branded merchandise, pop-up stores and breathless coverage of publishers’ announcements months before their release. Her debut, Conversations with a Friend, and its sequel, Ordinary People, were both adapted for television. Judging by the comments in these breathless coverage, it has become almost cliché to complain that people find her books boring and uninteresting, yet millions of readers find them utterly fascinating. And yet, in her fourth novel, Interlude, Sally Rooney tries something entirely different.
Rooney’s archetypal heroine is a bookish, slightly awkward young woman in a passionate but difficult relationship. Hailed as a writer who chronicles the particular millennial experience, Rooney ultimately writes very old-fashioned novels about love and friendship, not so different from Middlemarch or Persuasion. The powerful narrative momentum she conjures always revolves around couples and whether they can come together and stay together in the face of toxic families, superficial friends, and societal pressures.
Interlude, on the other hand, is the story of two brothers, Ivan, in his early twenties, and Peter, ten years older. As the title suggests, the novel depicts an interlude, a brief period of crisis that changes the relationship between the brothers forever. Their father-son bond, already weakened by years of resentment and misunderstanding, is further tested by the death of Ivan and Peter’s father.
By Sally Rooney. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
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While those who only casually read (or disregard) Rooney’s work might assume that all her works are similar, Rooney’s previous novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, was itself an experiment, employing a dual narrative style that differed from her more direct predecessors. The two female protagonists are best friends but are geographically separated, and each has a complicated romantic relationship. They exchange emails to communicate their thoughts and feelings, and these letters alternate with chapters written in the third person that describe the characters’ actions only from the outside. In that novel, Rooney details what people are doing but does not reveal what is going on inside, leaving the reader to infer their motivations (or, more often than not, their justifications). This disjunction between stated values and actions has increasingly fascinated Rooney. In Beautiful World, the novelist Alice admits that she constantly speaks and writes about her left-wing political beliefs but does not actually act on them. The same could be said about Frances, the protagonist of Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends, but Alice is more aware of this typical millennial conundrum: She finds her writing “morally and politically worthless,” yet acknowledges that “it’s what I do with my life, and it’s the only thing I want to do.”
The gap between what you believe and what you do is one of Intermezzo’s major themes. In a key showdown between the brothers, Ivan (who fell into the red pill hole as a teenager but is now very kind) tells Peter that “actions are more important than beliefs.” This pierces the heart, as Peter, a human rights lawyer, wants nothing more than to “be right and be proven right,” but at the same time blames himself for having been involved with two women. The first is Sylvia, a literature professor and Peter’s ex-girlfriend, who he believes to be the love of his life. Their once perfect relationship fell apart when Sylvia suffered chronic pain and was somehow mysteriously disabled after a car accident. Sylvia broke up with Peter because, in her words, “the way most people talk about sex” “I can’t do it anymore. I can’t do it in the normal way, and not without a lot of pain.” Peter remains infatuated with Sylvia, accompanying her to doctor’s appointments and long walks, discussing 18th-century prose form and the need for “ecological eros,” while he sleeps with women his brother’s own age and gives them money.
The death of Ivan and Peter’s kindly father shakes up the brothers’ habitual patterns, revealing Ivan’s capacity for love and Peter’s fear. that.
In contrast to his popular and successful brother, Ivan, a chess genius, has never had a lover until he meets Margaret, the director of the local arts center, while playing an exhibition game against ten opponents. The two fall in love, but Margaret insists on keeping their relationship secret because she cannot bear to be the subject of village gossip. The few parts of Intermezzo told from Margaret’s point of view help to emphasize both that Margaret is oppressed by the conventions of small-town life, just as Peter is afraid of being seen as an oddball by his peers. But Margaret is not a rebellious misfit like Marianne in “Ordinary People.” First, she is older, and her failed marriage and inability to ignore what her neighbors think of her wear her down. Having separated from her alcoholic husband, Margaret carefully built an image of herself locally as a “respectable, strong woman.” Just how many people hated her for that alone, and would finally be happy to see her humiliated? Vulgar, sleazy, ostentatious. No wonder her husband became an alcoholic.”
The first time Margaret and Ivan sleep together, Margaret wakes up to find him alone in her bed and thinks to herself, “Well, that’s what boys his age like to do on the weekends. Why not with her?” But this is completely wrong. Ivan is just in the shower, looking at Margaret in awe, aware that unlike Peter, he doesn’t know how to be comfortable with other people, especially women.
We know all this because Intermezzo, unlike Beautiful World, gives the reader full access to the thoughts and feelings of its protagonists. Because of this, we can see that they constantly misunderstand each other. The core of the brothers’ estrangement lies in just such a misunderstanding. Determined to be seen as a white knight and one of the winners in life, Peter is revealed (in a chapter of agitated, fragmented sentences, stripped of grammatical subjects) to be teetering on the brink of a deadly darkness. “Just thinking, or not even thinking, hearing the words in my own head,” continues this inner monologue. “A strange relief, like an unfastened fastening: I want. The deepest, most final desire. There is bitterness in it too, yes, an extravagant bitterness. And why not? I mean, if the thought is so comforting. Oh, of course, for the others. To protect them. The others want you to suffer.”
The book’s cover features chess pieces positioned just right on a board, inviting us to interpret “intermezzo” as the chess term “an unexpected move that poses a serious threat and forces an immediate response.” The death of Ivan and Peter’s kindly father is just such a disruption, shaking the brothers out of their habitual patterns and exposing Ivan’s capacity for love and Peter’s fear of love. Many of Rooney’s abiding themes appear in the novel: the devastating fear of being thought ridiculous and not “normal,” the disturbing ways in which the polarity of power in relationships can be reversed, the possibility that erotic intimacy can transcend barriers between people. But the relationship at the novel’s center is not a romantic one, and the result is a work that feels quite different from its predecessors. Rooney’s novels, despite her sober assessments of modern conventions and her almost brooding candor, have always been founded on a belief in true love, the idea that everything could be resolved if only a man and a woman could find a way to choose to be together.
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On the other hand, brothers cannot avoid being connected to each other. It is only the quality of their relationship that matters. But this does not make Ivan and Peter’s suffering any less moving or profound. On the contrary: while cooking dinner, remembering the meal he once cooked for his father, Ivan feels a strong desire to “say and hear once more the words that I can never say or hear again; to return once more to the house, not dark and bare, but airy and bright with open windows; to spend one more afternoon together, playing with the dog, eating dinner, doing nothing, just being together.” Anyone who has lost a beloved parent knows the pain.
Novels about grief, however powerful, lack the narrative thrust of novels about true love; love is frustrated and ultimately affirmed (all of Rooney’s novels have happy endings). At the center of Intermezzo is no “Sally Rooney girl” the reader can identify with and root for. Other aspects of the novel are puzzling, even a little contrived: Why doesn’t anyone realize that Ivan has a neurodevelopmental disorder? Why can’t Peter and Sylvia at least try to get over her seeming inability to have sex? But what’s most striking about Intermezzo is its lack of the old, reliable engine of hope and possibility that made her first three novels so addictive.
This is new and deeper territory for Rooney. She has always seemed very ambivalent about her celebrity status, as evidenced by Alice’s loathing of her PR image in Beautiful World: “I hate the way she presents herself, I hate the way she looks, and I hate her opinions on everything. And yet, when other people read about her, they believe she’s me.” Though sadder and more of a page-turner than her previous three books, Intermezzo is in many ways a truer book. Rooney’s previous love stories are all charming, but they tend to have tidy endings that defy reality. Rarely do most problems get solved by two people finally becoming a couple, and loss is inevitable in all parts of life. Intermezzo is the work of an artist who is constantly experimenting with new techniques and growing, but it may not be the kind of direction that will inspire bucket hats, tote bags, or a Netflix film adaptation. Perhaps not all of her current fans will follow her there, but those who do will not regret it. that.
