GRAPEY BOOK CLUB: Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo is a Masterwork

Repeat Offenders Section Editor Nic Chang returns with another Grapey Book Club article to review Sally Rooney’s latest novel Intermezzo, which they declare is a masterwork!

“To return to the house once more, and not find it dark and empty, but airy and bright again with open windows. To spend an afternoon together, playing with the dog, eating dinner, doing nothing, only being together, just once more.”

In chess, the intermezzo is when a player plays an unexpected move that appears as a threat to the opponent and must be immediately responded to, in which they play their expected move. I kept thinking about why Sally Rooney would title her latest novel that, and how the symbolism of chess would play into her narrative. Then it struck me that the intermezzo reflects Rooney’s complex character relationships – how new ones form unexpectedly and throw lives into uncertain yet exciting futures, while longer-lasting relationships fall into the same patterns of love, resentment and emotional distance.

Sally Rooney has always been a fascinating writer. As politically and intellectually engaged as her writing is, she always utilises her evocative style to explore her characters’ inner thoughts, their desires and their insecurities surging through their minds, almost ready to burst at the seams. In that regard, her latest novel, Intermezzo, feels familiar in a more melancholic sense, all whilst her writing continues to philosophically evolve, rendering it her most ambitious and cathartically character-driven work yet.

Intermezzo follows brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek, both of them growing distant in the wake of their father’s death. Peter is a successful Dublin lawyer in his thirties, but his more confident appearance only hides his unresolved pain. To cope with his father’s death, he medicates himself to sleep whilst struggling to manage his relationships with Sylvia, his first love, and Naomi, a college student in her early twenties, who faces financial struggle and the looming threat of homelessness. Ivan is a 22-year-old competitive chess player struggling with social awkwardness, bound to compare himself negatively in the shadow of his older brother. However, he meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her divorce, during a tournament where he wins ten chess games simultaneously, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. As Peter and Ivan navigate their relationships, they are forced to face a new chapter in their unpredictable lives.

If these characters sound familiar to you, that’s because they are. They feel like people we would meet, know, and see as friends or even family. It’s a testament to how Rooney makes them real. She achieves this by employing a stream-of-consciousness style, shifting between the limited third-person perspectives of her characters, whilst still maintaining her matter-of-fact prose (from her voice reflecting the mundanity of her characters to the intentional lack of quotation marks in dialogue) that first defined her. As such, Intermezzo is psychologically attuned to its characters and their philosophies, making them more relatable.

What makes her style so captivating is how she evokes melancholy from her atmosphere. She characterises her settings with great attention to detail, but goes further by emphasising the memories that Peter and Ivan vividly remember in these places. What used to be a source of comfort and happiness at the Koubek household has become lost overtime. Try as you may to recreate these moments, but they’re just that – fleeting memories.

Peter Koubek – what a deeply sad character. He seems to have it all together, but what he’s going through is a completely different story. He is innately selfish, shifting his intimacy between his two lovers and not being afraid to speak his mind, but without consideration of everyone else’s feelings. It’s best exemplified in the scene when he and Ivan meet up for lunch, the first time they’ve met in months, and it seems to go well, but when Peter describes Ivan’s relationship with Margaret as “weird,” given their age gap, a civil lunch ends with a hostile argument. The irony isn’t lost here, given Peter’s relationship with the much younger Naomi. But such scenes highlight the brotherly dynamic between Ivan and Peter, and the unpredictable ups and downs they go through.

But I’ll be surprised if there’s any other literary character from this year that I relate to more than Ivan. He’s at the start of his life, but the brutal uncertainties of adulthood always plague him. He doesn’t know where to go, what ambitions he has, and he struggles to relate to or interact with others, always being wary of the way he speaks and how he is perceived by others, which Rooney vividly captures in his first interactions with Margaret. Even when he senses how awkward he is, he tries to salvage the situation, his mind unable to stop overthinking. His study of chess and his participation in tournaments act as forms of escapism, but that’s not always enough, but when he forms a connection with Margaret, he’s fascinated by her warmth and patience. She already has more experience and insight in life than Ivan. As much as she finds herself connected to him, she also doesn’t want to harm him in any way or be seen as someone taking advantage of a younger man in his grieving state. But Rooney turns what could’ve been a tacky, unethical relationship into something profound and complex, always sensitive to their complications.

Since Rooney is more interested in how her characters behave rather than making them serve as plot devices, Intermezzo is intentionally messy. This isn’t your novel for the average mainstream reader. She allows her sentences to transform into tangents to reflect the spiralling mindsets of her characters. She lets paragraphs go on forever, sometimes to capture the sensuality of sexual relationships or the inner frustrations building within. Chunks of the novel often lack narrative progression, dragging out in certain chapters and consistently feeling directionless, but such is life. Even in our twenties or thirties, do we ever feel like we have our shit together? Through these character flaws, Rooney directly confronts this idea, but not without allowing for empathy in her prose.

If there’s only one major issue in Intermezzo, it sometimes moves towards a neater direction as it reaches its end. The catharsis is undeniable, but Rooney’s sense of resolution sometimes contradicts the complex uncertainties of life, which is always felt in her storytelling. But the message is not lost. Wherever we are, we just have to keep moving. We will not always know what is ahead, but we have to live forwards rather than live in the past. Highly recommended reading.

Rating: ★★★★½