‘Intermezzo’ Is Sally Rooney’s Most Moving Novel Yet

Sally Rooney, who made such a splash with her first novel, Conversations with Friends, back in 2017, has made it clear with each succeeding book that she is no flash in the pan. Intermezzo, her fourth novel, is her most fully developed and moving yet.

It’s about two Irish brothers, 32-year-old Peter Koubek, a Dublin lawyer, and 22-year-old Ivan, a chess prodigy, and their troubled relationships with each other and the women in their lives. After their mother moved in with another man when Ivan was small, they were raised mainly by their father, an engineer who immigrated to Ireland in the 1980s from Slovakia. We meet them soon after their father’s death following years battling cancer. Both brothers, at loose ends, are struggling with the question, “Under what conditions is life endurable?”

The simple answer, consistent throughout Rooney’s work, is that what makes life not just endurable but rich and meaningful is connecting with others, romantically and platonically, through deep conversations and love, which is easier said than done. Her novels take us down long and winding roads in search of often elusive fulfillment.

Intermezzo, although filled with plenty of grief and strife, is less disturbing (and ultimately happier, if never exactly sunny) than the early novels, including Normal People (2018) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). The ever-resonant conversations, often about delicate subjects, are still alternately soul-baring and couched, plaintive and meandering. The sex scenes — physical expressions of her characters’ emotional communions — are as beautiful as ever. But Intermezzo is focused less on topical questions about how to live in a troubled, increasingly unviable world and more on the psychological ramifications of love, loss and heartache.

About the title: The word intermezzo, meaning an interlude in a drama, opera, or musical work, can also refer to a light palate cleanser between courses in a rich meal. Amusingly, Intermezzo is also the brand name of a form of the insomnia medication, zolpidem. But more relevant to Rooney’s novel is its sense as an unexpected move in chess. The narrative of Intermezzo, in which Rooney continually rearranges her characters like pieces on a chessboard, features many game-changing surprise moves.

It wouldn’t be a Rooney novel without romantic entanglements. Peter’s are complicated. For months, he has been involved in an “ongoing sexual and also quietly financial relationship” with Naomi, a university student who supports herself with occasional sex work. He’s fond of her, but is haunted by his abiding love for his college girlfriend, Sylvia Larkin, now a professor of modern literature. Sylvia broke up with him six years earlier after a debilitating accident, insisting that she didn’t want to ruin his life. Peter has never gotten over her, which makes him feel guilty about leading Naomi on.

Rooney conveys Peter’s desperate, suicidal state with a Joycean staccato, jangled stream-of-consciousness: “Thoughts rattling and noisy almost always and then when quiet frightening unhappy. Mental not right maybe. Never maybe was.”

While Peter sees Naomi mainly in her grungy, noisy, illegal shared flat, he and Sylvia meet regularly for civilized meals and arm-in-arm strolls through familiar streets in the rain. (It’s always raining in this novel.) They talk easily about her lectures and a big discrimination case he has won against a business with a demeaning dress code for its female employees. Rooney conveys the enormous comfort Peter finds in Sylvia so well that we share “the deep replenishing reservoir of her presence.”

Ivan is as socially awkward and reticent as his brother is dominant and ambitious. Despite a degree in theoretical physics, he barely supports himself, taking on just enough freelance data analysis work to enable him to focus on competitive chess. After a weekend chess exhibition where he plays 10 people at once at a local arts council several hours outside Dublin, the program director gives him a lift to his rented lodging for the night. Margaret, 14 years Ivan’s senior, is guiltily separated from her alcoholic husband. The tentative but intense connection that unfolds between these two sidelined people is one of the great pleasures of this novel.

When the brothers get together for dinner at Sylvia’s urging, Ivan cautiously opens up about his new relationship. Peter’s kneejerk reaction is disparaging, which causes Ivan to hit back: “I’ve hated you my entire life.” With its fraught fraternal dynamic, Intermezzo taps into a classic literary theme — think Cain and Abel, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys, Sam Shepard’s True West, and even James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small.

The novel is also sprinkled with fragmented quotes from various literary classics, including Hamlet, The Waste Land, The Golden Bowl, and Ulysses — which Rooney duly cites in her endnotes. But don’t let the erudition put you off. Embedding quotes from beloved texts has become popular with writers, at once a way of paying homage and adding layers of meaning.

Intermezzo propels you to its well-earned, moving climax with nary a false move. This story about learning how to accept loss and pain ultimately involves the exhilaration of flinging all the windows and doors of life wide open: “Everything exposed to light and air. Nothing protected, nothing left to be protected anymore.”

Another question Rooney’s characters ponder: “What can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking?” Apparently — like this novel — quite a lot.