At this point, it feels as though there is very little interesting left that can be said about Sally Rooney. Every criticism has been mined, every degree of adulation expressed. Seven years on from her dazzling debut Conversations With Friends, and particularly since the stratospheric success of Normal People the following year, Rooney occupies a unique place in modern culture.She is a once-in-a-generation sybil, the first great millennial author. Or: her books are superficially political, her prose is hollow. She’s a genius. She’s a charlatan.
This stifling weight of expectation seeped into her third novel, Beautiful World Where Are You?, much of it reading like a pre-empt to the inevitable critics. At times it was cripplingly self-conscious and overwrought with caveats. But with her latest offering, Rooney is firmly back in the driver’s seat.
Unlike her previous novels, Intermezzo largely focuses on the interior lives of men — Peter, a 32-year-old successful Dublin barrister and his brother Ivan, ten years his junior, a competitive chess player. The pair are foils for one another — Peter is charming and unassailable, a former college debater who has surpassed his station by successfully ingratiating himself into Dublin’s middle-class, intellectual elite. Ivan, on the other hand, is presented as an awkward loner, formerly incel-adjacent; we are constantly reminded of the fact that he still wears braces at 22. He feels himself, Rooney writes, “to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.”
Rooney writes about the helplessness of love with such searing clarity as to knock the wind out of you
Both are reeling in the wake of their father’s death, and both come to find themselves, against their better judgment, in love. After victory at a chess competition in a village outside Dublin, Ivan meets Margaret, the venue’s 36-year-old manager, a solitary homebody who has recently separated from her alcoholic husband. Their mutual attraction is instant, and an unlikely, semi-secret, relationship blossoms. Margaret, who also has chapters written from her point of view, is concerned about the perception of dating someone barely out of university. Still, they find quiet solace in one another, both, in different ways, on life’s fringes.
Peter, meanwhile, is sleeping with 23-year-old Naomi, an actual university student and periodic sex worker, living in (and then evicted from) an illegal squat, whose bills and expenses Peter frequently pays, and with whom he enjoys rough sex. He is, though, also still in love with his university girlfriend and now “platonic life partner” Sylvia, a lecturer who was in an unspecified but devastating accident seven years prior, leaving her in chronic pain and unable to have penetrative intercourse. He loves both women, and is terrified by it, numbing the pain and confusion with a cocktail of drugs and alcohol.
Love and loneliness have been Rooney’s bread and butter since Conversations with Friends. But in Intermezzo, she writes about the helplessness of love with such searing clarity as to knock the wind out of you. “The worst, most vulgar form of selfishness, which is desire”, Peter muses of his increasingly untenable situation. When Margaret’s friends find out about her scandalous relationship with Ivan, she wistfully mourns the “thin little scaffold of respectability she had called a life”.
There is now a newfound maturity to Rooney’s prose. Where her first three novels are preoccupied with the mores of the twenty-something experience, Rooney is now in her thirties, and so are two of the protagonists. Margaret and Peter, in their own ways, are driven by the panic of clutching to fading youth.
In form, too, Intermezzo is an exercise in development. The chapters told from Peter’s perspective are characterised by a staccato, Joycean style, often without definite articles and functional verbs. It is experimental for Rooney, and while it at times verges on extreme, it delivers some of the most affecting writing of her career. The book opens with a masterclass: “Didn't seem fair on the young lad,” thinks Peter of Ivan. “That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.”
Somewhat frustrating, though, is the sexual set-up between Naomi and Sylvia
As with many of Rooney’s novels, sex remains a point of contention. For a writer whose characters are so axiomatically grounded in the grit of reality, their sex lives are often fantastical. Ivan and Margaret float effortlessly into simultaneous orgasm – an elusive achievement at the best of times, let alone for a couple which is half comprised of a 22-year-old quasi-virgin.
Somewhat frustrating, too, is the sexual set-up between Naomi and Sylvia. The former is hyper-sexual: a young floozy who makes money from OnlyFans (Rooney dances around naming the website, but the implication is obvious), spends her money “on ketamine and eyelash extensions”, and likes being degraded in bed. The latter literally can’t have sex, but, instead is a saint-like intellectual. Virgin or whore, hot or interesting? Even if that dichotomy can be put down to the limitations of Peter’s flawed perspective, it still jars.
Since Normal People, Rooney’s career has been defined by a demand – by readers, by critics, by the incessant whirring of social media – for perfection. Every possible iteration of life, every sensibility, every experience, must, they claim, be reflected in her work. It is an impossible and undesirable feat. Wisely, Rooney has ignored it all with Intermezzo. The quirks that make her simultaneously beloved and maligned remain – whether or not her characters could seamlessly walk into any one of her novels hardly matters if the art itself is good. And boy is it good. So no, there is no such thing as a perfect novel. But if a perfect Sally Rooney novel exists, this might just be it.
