Intermezzo: What else is new?
Cara Hösterey on Sally Rooney's new novel Intermezzo, repeating themes, and character development
This year, I have read all of Sally Rooney’s novels, the latest being her most recent release Intermezzo (2024). All but Intermezzo were rereads of rereads. So maybe I’m a fanatic, I don’t know. I do know, however, that her work speaks to me in ways few others do.
We meet Ivan and Peter at the funeral of their father, who died after having cancer for five years. The first few lines introduce us to their dynamic: Ivan is wearing a poorly fitted suit, has braces, and little social grace. Peter, quite the opposite, pities him for it. Over the course of the novel, the two struggle up against this dynamic, and struggle to move past it. Ivan— twenty-two and aging out of his identity as a chess prodigy, makes the acquaintance of Margaret— thirty-six and managing a local arts and culture center— at one of his chess events. There is a mutual attraction there, and Ivan invites Margaret to his accommodation for the night, after the event. The two hook up and begin a tentative relationship, which quickly escalates into proper love. Margaret feels torn about this, being the older woman. Ivan, meanwhile, is entirely enthusiastic about his connection to her. Their relationship changes both of them: Ivan softens, and is freed of the loneliness that has haunted him for a long time. Margaret confronts her need for conformity and learns to live with the new person she has become, someone who loves someone fourteen years her junior.
Meanwhile Peter is hit hard by the complicated loss of a father he was often at odds with. He is accustomed to life altering loss: his university girlfriend, Sylvia, survived an accident that impairs her to this day. Their monogamous relationship ends after the accident, but their relationship never loses its romantic edge. Sylvia remains Peter’s ideal, the picture-perfect life he always thought he should have. Now, Peter is seeing someone new: Naomi, in her early twenties, an erratic character, a borderline sex worker. In the midst of a seriously dangerous mental breakdown, Peter weighs out the two women, convinced that he has to make a decision for one and against the other, and the assumption that either will have him. But things don’t quite go the way he thinks they should, and he is forced to let go of the idea of the future he worked all his life to attain. It is in his sections that one of the novel’s few weaknesses shows: the stream of consciousness, elliptical style Rooney doesn’t quite pull off. Peter’s passages read as choppy and disorienting while failing to elegantly communicate his disfigured mental state. Rooney’s formal attempt reads as cheesy: of course the emotionally closed-off, high-functioning man fails to think in full sentences. What works about Rooney’s style here though is the blurred line between dialogue and inner monologue, facilitated by her signature lack of quotation marks. The short half-sentences that convey Peter’s interiority might just as well have been said in conversation with, most often, Sylvia of Naomi, and it is in those moments that her style works, when you can really get lost in the mess that is Peter.
Ivan’s and Peter’s romantic entanglements quantitatively take up the most space of the novel, but it is the brothers’ antagonistic relationship that sits at the heart of the story. In a book concerned with age gaps, it is theirs that feels the most impactful. Peter blatantly doesn’t respect his little brother, who seems immature and reactionary to him, while he sees himself as the rational, reasonable one. But Peter’s self-righteousness becomes undeniable: he judges Ivan’s older girlfriend for being with a younger man, while he pays the bills for his twenty-three year old girlfriend. Peter’s condescension leads Ivan to block his brother out of his life, which causes Peter’s mental state to descend further. He does what most severely depressed people do: he’s a dick to the people who love him the most. He discards Naomi, has an ugly fight with Sylvia, and hits his brother in the face. It’s the women in the novel that lead Peter back to Ivan bit by bit, in line with Rooney’s subtle commentary about the gender dynamics we can’t quite shake off. By the end, we aren’t given a resolution to the brothers’ conflict, but we are shown the first step towards each other that holds the promise of more.
Undoubtedly, one of the impressions the reader familiar with her other work will get from the start is that we have been here before. The same milieu: white, Irish, mainly set in Dublin, and, broadly speaking, middle class (although Rooney would contest this term as a Marxist). Politics are again interwoven into the fabric of the relationships, similar to how Connell and Marianne’s relationship in Normal People is shaped by their socio-economic background, though this time, she focuses on age gaps. And our protagonists are really and truly dependent on each other, for better and for worse. But what would compel Rooney to divert from this? She addressed criticism of her work being stagnant in a recent New York Times interview and challenges the contemporary tendency to demand newness in every sphere of life, especially art.
There seems to be an increased awareness of this paradigm failing in popular culture, Taylor Swift having spoken about the pressure on female artists to keep evolving into new versions of themselves in her documentary Miss Americana: “Be new to us, be young to us, but only in a new way and only in the way we want. And reinvent yourself, but only in a way that we find to be equally comforting but also a challenge for you. Live out a narrative that we find to be interesting enough to entertain us, but not so crazy that it makes us uncomfortable.” The question remains: why do we demand our artists to reinvent themselves with every new release? Is it because we truly want to see artists improve, or do we just want to stay entertained by the shininess of the latest iteration? Rooney seems to think it is the latter. The great writers of the past didn’t all innovate with every new novel, she says. Jane Austen, for example, certainly honed her craft over time, but never necessarily reinvented herself as writer in any major way. Her novels are astute, humorous character studies, and that is that. Sally Rooney might be no Jane Austen (or is she? Only time will tell), but her writing practice is similar. The setting doesn’t change, nor does her intense focus on the interiority of her characters.
What I come to her novels for is the characters she so brilliantly constructs where their loneliness and need for other people is as vivid and real as mine. Maybe Sally Rooney writes the same novel over and over again (or has done so so far. Let’s not forget how young her career is), but isn’t every story–at its heart–about the complications, hurt, and joys of life as we desperately cling to one another? At the very least, this seems to be the undercurrent of every story, the thread that weaves it together. And Rooney foregrounds this to the extreme. Everything is character, everything is relationship, interconnection. And I don’t want her to stop doing that, I want to get to come back to that over (and over and over and over) again.
Cara (they/them) is a queer writer who is currently on their year abroad at Amherst College. They study English Literature and Philosophy. They write personal essays, short fiction and poetry, and are mainly interested in exploring themes of queer identity, femininity and mental health in living under capitalism. They also make collages, and have recently gotten into songwriting.