Sally Rooney’s breakout book, Normal People – more than 1m copies sold in the UK alone – proved her to be a peerless creator of flesh and blood characters with a keen eye for the thrill and complication of sex and desire. Yet despite her success, she has seemed to mistrust her talent, serving up her usual treats in her last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You – the story of a love quadrilateral – with a side order of self-consciousness, as if she wanted to be the first to do it down.
Unlike BWWAY (as it became known), her new novel doesn’t worry so openly about its value in a burning world, and feels more serious as a result. And not just more serious: Intermezzo is perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements. It’s centred not on a longstanding friendship but two rivalrous siblings, which gives her a heftier shared history to use for emotional punch as well as laugh-out-loud comedy.
Set in Dublin in 2022, from late summer to Christmas, the book follows two brothers: Peter, 32, a lawyer, and Ivan, 22, a chess player (and sketchily employed data analyst), whose progress through the rankings has flatlined since their father, recently dead from cancer, first got ill in Ivan’s late teens. Ivan kicks off the novel’s action when his victory in a comeback event ends with him bedding the 36-year-old venue manager, Margaret, who, as Ivan doesn’t yet know, has an estranged alcoholic husband not quite off the scene.
Peter’s love life is spicier still. He still frequently shares a bed with his former university debating partner, Sylvia, a literary academic. They’re obvious soulmates, but nonetheless broke up, at her instigation, when a road accident left her in chronic untreatable pain that makes sex no-go, a situation the novel treats with unsensational seriousness. Peter’s subsequent promiscuity has come to rest with Naomi, a soon-to-be homeless student Ivan’s age; she makes ends meet with racy online snaps, drug-dealing and the odd handout from Peter – which leaves each of them tiptoeing around the question of whether or not her pliancy in bed is nothing but a survival strategy.
Of the central characters, Naomi is the only one from whose point of view Rooney doesn’t write, switching in unhurried paragraphs between third-person interior monologues from Ivan, Margaret and Peter, whose segments are a seamlessly Joycean flow of thought and speech. See this passage when, after a drunken binge, he passes out at the sight of both his lovers: “Probably dehydrated Naomi says. Like you literally never drink water. I’m surprised you don’t collapse more. She’s sitting at the table he can tell from the directionality of her voice though he can only from here see the ceiling and part of the far wall. Clink of teaspoon also he hears. I don’t know, says Sylvia. I think it might have been the shock of seeing us in the same room together.”
