Intermezzo

Intermezzo Jessi Jezewska Stevens

The proliferation of binaries offers a new language of possibility in Sally Rooney’s latest novel.

Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 454 pages, $29

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Of the young, Irish, best-selling author Sally Rooney, there is one point on which critics can agree: she is the uncontested heir to the nineteenth-century marriage plot.

It is a blueprint Rooney has expertly updated for an era paced for screens. Her first two novels, Conversation with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), flip the will-they-won’t-they coin with every scene, producing a narrative propulsion that most Hollywood scriptwriters—taught to alternate narrative beats with positive and negative emotional “charge”—would envy. These are lean novels, the prose so unfussy as to be almost plain, the characters liberated from backstory. (While another author might spend all of Normal People exploring Marianne’s abusive upbringing, Rooney compresses the entire history into a few glancing, violent paragraphs.) As a result, conflict is generated almost exclusively through character responses to present action—most often, self-generated.

Because, as in the Victorian novels they emulate, Rooney’s protagonists are profoundly preoccupied with their own ethical behavior, in romance above all. “She tries to be a good person,” we learn of Marianne. “But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.”

In 2018, such passages were triumphantly held up as a prism for the—then mysterious—millennial mind. Other critics, however, declared this hand-wringing overwrought. They took issue with characters’ glosses on Marxism. (In Conversations with Friends, monogamy is described as “based on a commitment model, which served the needs of men in patrilineal societies by allowing them to pass property to their genetic offspring,” i.e., Victorian.)

They took issue, above all, with the emails. In Rooney’s lightly digitized worlds, characters outline idealistic analyses of economic and romantic power relations in friends’ inboxes: “At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape,” writes Alice, the protagonist of Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). “But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall.”

No wonder these characters so often feel like moral failures: they have set themselves an impossible task.

Still, there was something remarkably liquid, something “unshaped,” about Rooney’s early protagonists, who, despite different class and gender markers, tended to share similar worldviews.

Her latest, by contrast, presents a far more realized and varied cast. The effect serves to reframe prior critical debates, bringing to mind literary scholar Sianne Ngai’s arguments about the perils of shoehorning the novel-of-ideas into a realist skin. The solution of embodying ideas in characters, Ngai notes, “cannot do much when characters are as abstract as the ideas they personify.” The other solution, which is to stage conversations about ideas between characters, can be equally fraught.

Could it be that Rooney’s harshest critics took umbrage not with her characters’ anxious politics, per se, but with the way Rooney, now thirty-three, previously split the difference between the novel-of-ideas and the realist romance? If so, Intermezzo is poised to convert initial skeptics.

Email-free, Intermezzo is fittingly invested in the imperative of embodiment. Its beating heart is a pair of Irish-Slovak brothers, Ivan and Peter Koubek, opposites in every way save one. Reeling from the recent loss of their father, both have fallen in love with women society would deem “unsuitable,” even “abnormal.” The novel traces their parallel attempts to make sense of the sense-defying experience of losing a parent—and falling in love.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old chess prodigy who spent his entire adolescence reading “opening theory,” standard sequences every grand master must memorize. He has emerged into adulthood sexually naïve, socially awkward, and overly analytical—in other words, the perfect vehicle for the social-sexual anxiety of the classic Rooney protagonist, in whom such thought patterns weren’t always so linked to character subjectivity.

He is also funny. Watching hapless volunteers set up tables and chairs for a tournament, he imagines writing a computer program to help: “The accuracy of these particular men, in relation to the moves recommended by such a program, would be, Ivan thinks, pretty low, like actually very low.” Spotting Margaret, fourteen years his senior and a staff member at the tournament venue, it’s he who becomes flustered. Too confused about the rules for picking up a woman, let alone an older woman, he aborts: “It’s like the problem with the tables and chairs.”

At thirty-two, Peter is nearly Margaret’s age. A prominent Dublin barrister trained in philosophy, he is Joycean-ly virile, verbally gifted, and far too popular with the ladies. He is dating Naomi, a street-smart, twenty-three-year-old student and occasional sex worker, but still pines for his college sweetheart, Sylvia, now a professor of literature. While Sylvia is the more “suitable” partner, she broke up with Peter years ago following an awful accident that, due to lingering chronic pain, has left her unable to endure penetrative sex.

This partitioning of desirable but seemingly diametric qualities—beauty and brains, sex and intimacy, youth and wisdom—in two separate female bodies drives Peter mad. Stoned on Xanax, he strolls through Dublin’s streets with the nervy shorthand of Leopold Bloom, hating himself: “Most women ultimately very likable individuals. Men, as everyone knows, disgusting. . . . And Ivan? Different. . . . Sort of amoeba blob floating in a jar.” The turn to stream-of-consciousness invigorates Rooney’s prose, which shines especially in Margaret’s sections: “Life has slipped free of its netting,” she reflects. On the word “passionate”: “A word with blood running through it, a red word.” One she, a divorcée on the cusp of middle age, should avoid, particularly in the presence of a twenty-two-year-old.

Word choice is, in fact, the source of everyone’s problems. Hovering over the book are the language-games of Wittgenstein: “Reality is actually one thing and language something else,” as Ivan paraphrases. The consequences of this break between language and the material ripple outward in a series of binaries, as if forcing characters to choose. “Sobriety against decadence, intellect against appetite, he could go on,” Peter thinks, and Rooney does, examining spirit against flesh; millennial against Gen Z; and, most provocatively, because most Victorian, man against woman. Intermezzo’s characters are sturdy enough to embody these Platonic paradoxes, their real-life situations complex enough to evade them: in this novel, “the name you give to a presumed relation between a man and woman may be both correct and incorrect at once.”

Rooney’s previous books resolved these binaries by falling in between, refusing to “name” relationships at all. Intermezzo, via the optimism (or is it nihilism?—Rooney dares not ask) of its Gen Z characters, suggests coming up with a new language altogether, a kind of Wittgensteinian “third possibility!” Though we may be confined to rearranging names like deck chairs aboard the S. S. Reality, there’s nothing to stop us from finding new formations, new descriptions of falling in love that better, if still imperfectly, reflect contemporary experience, and so cause less pain.

I have my quibbles with Rooney’s style. I often crave an outburst, a Brontë-like rupture in the cool self-control that extends like a frost throughout her novels, governing characters and sentences alike. I wonder, too, if the proliferation of binaries taxes the novel’s focus.

Still, I cannot help but admire Rooney the storyteller, willing to toe that tricky line between the pleasure-read and philosophy, determined to choose cooperation over cynicism. If the millennial mind is overwrought, exhausted, and losing its edge, Intermezzo suggests, have mercy. We canceled the dictionary. The language heretofore assigned to our social relations no longer applies to the particular case. Naturally, we have become tongue-tied, middle-aged. Gen Z to save the day?

Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of the novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors. Her debut story collection, Ghost Pains, was published by And Other Stories in March.