Intermezzo: A Novel
“Rooney’s characters may get caught in a 'tangled web,' but they learn how to live with decency and courage and compassion. Normal may be a lot less important than one thinks.”
Intermezzo is embedded firmly in what has become familiar ground for Sally Rooney: a landscape of menage à trois, inconvenient relationships, family tragedies and dramas, decency and despair, friendships, conversations, beauty, wit, and steamy sexual encounters. Familiar ground could suggest redundancy and imaginative failure for some writers. But not for Rooney. Accusing Rooney of repeating characters or plots might be like accusing Flannery O’Connor of tracking the same themes, settings, and Christ-haunted individuals in her stories. As with O’Connor, the depths Rooney plumbs are idiosyncratically hers.
In Intermezzo, Rooney brilliantly and hypnotically creates a universe parallel to the worlds she has created in three previous novels—Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You? Intermezzo narrates the story of two brothers, who were born and raised in Kildare, Peter and Ivan Koubek, and their fraught relationship with each other and the women in their lives. Peter, 32 years old, is a successful but unhappy lawyer, and Ivan, his 22-year-old brother, is a recent university graduate, a young man with marginal social skills, and a chess genius who is on a downslope in his career. Their father recently died after a long illness, and the brothers cannot find a way to bridge the gulf created by their grief. Alienated from one another by sorrow and depression, they live in their mutual isolation.
Their father’s death is only one part of their loneliness. Some years back the love of Peter’s life, Sylvia, was in a terrible accident that led her to break off their relationship rather than tie him to a woman who was in constant pain and unable to enjoy any physical contact with him. Add the beautiful 23-year-old Naomi, college student and internet soft-core porn entrepreneur, to the mix, and one triangle goes jingle jangle. Then there is Ivan and his 36-year-old newfound love, Margaret Kearns, and Peter’s hypocritical judgment of the inappropriateness of the age gap. Triads and trinities abound in the narrative—there is Peter’s and Ivan’s mother, now remarried, and their conflicted bond with her.
The primary triangle seems to be Peter-Naomi-Sylvia. Any reader familiar with Rooney’s work feel some déjà vu here, as if they are re-experiencing the Frances-Melissa-Nick situation of Conversations with Friends. And, in an important respect, Intermezzo comes to the same inconclusive conclusion that one finds in Conversations with Friends. The solution both novels come to: “Go on in any case living.” The idea of polyamory finds its way into all of Rooney’s books, and Intermezzo doesn’t stray from that complication.
Rooney’s principal characters—be it the 22-year-old Ivan, existing rather unhappily somewhere on the communication spectrum, and falling in love with a 36-year-old not-yet-divorced theater manager, or Peter trying to sort of his love for a 23-year-old college student, Naomi, and his forever love, Sylvia—drown or learn to survive in the currents of unconventional love. They find themselves in an “experiment bound almost certainly for one kind of failure or another, and yet attaining for these few hours and days to a miraculous success, a perfection of beauty, inexchangeable, meant not to be interpreted, meant only to be lived and nothing more.”
Instead of labeling the sorts of accepted ways to love and the kinds of relationships that fit the word normal, Rooney celebrates the idiosyncrasies of human interactions: “Because the name you give to a presumed relation between a man and a woman may be both correct and incorrect at once.” Maybe, as Rooney suggests and delineates in novel after novel, there is a third possibility.
The word intermezzo describes a short instrumental movement in an opera. All of Rooney’s work has elements of the soap opera to it, and Intermezzo has that in spades. As much soliloquizing about suicide as Hamlet. But unlike Hamlet, Rooney’s characters find a way to find a place between conventional morality and suicide. For Rooney and for them, there is a place between. Rooney’s characters may get caught in a ”tangled web,” but they learn how to live with decency and courage and compassion. Normal may be a lot less important than one thinks.