Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
In her masterful fourth novel Intermezzo, Sally Rooney conveys the tangles of grief and desire through the relationship between two brothers
The metaphor of chess is, in some ways, long overdue for Sally Rooney, an author whose novels are so meticulously choreographed, whose characters circle each other with such wary calculation, that each book feels like the invention of a new gameplay. In Intermezzo, we have our opening gambit: chess prodigy Ivan and lawyer Peter Koubek have just lost their father, and neither is handling it particularly well. Largely estranged from their mother and each other, each has effectively been rendered orphan at the tender age of 22 and 32 respectively. Enter the other piece on the board: gentle Margaret, Ivan’s 36 year-old divorced lover; Sylvia, Peter’s first love; and Naomi, his gen-Z girlfriend.
Rooney renders the various permutations of these relationships with her now-trademark acuity: trapped within defenceless desires and nervous insecurities, Ivan and Peter are also mired in a clagging grief that makes the idea of forward motion almost impossible. Peter’s passages in particular show astonishing formal command, conveyed through Joycean sentence fragments whose subject pronouns are entirely dissolved from the page. Yet abdication of autonomy does not really exist even in the most liminal states: with incredible, sensitive insight, Rooney snags again and again on the tension between helplessness and agency, on the illusion of ever being fully stuck in one’s own life. Intermezzo is a novel supposedly about interludes, but even interludes, she tells us, contain a driving force. Grief, lust, heartache. We play our moves out across them all.