By Beejay Silcox
FICTION
Intermezzo
Sally Rooney
Faber & Faber, $32.99
Like the boxing ring and the poker table, the chessboard is a rich terrain for storytellers. It’s an existential battleground, an allegorical playscape. In The Luzhin Defence (1964), Vladimir Nabokov used chess as a metaphor for obsessive madness. In The Queen’s Gambit (1979), Walter Tevis wrote the counterargument: chess mastery as self-mastery. In Stefan Zweig’s novella, The Royal Game (1942), chess was an analogy for the spread of Nazism.
Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo is a chess game, but she is in control of both sides of the board.Credit: New York Times
But when Lewis Carroll sent Alice back into Wonderland in Through the Looking Glass (1879), the game she played was childhood. Umberto Eco thought of chess as a potent analogy for reading (The Role of the Reader, 1979). And Raymond Chandler didn’t think much of it all: “as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency” (The Big Sleep, 1939).
Now it’s Sally Rooney’s turn at the board with her fourth novel, Intermezzo: a tale of sibling discord, sexual politics, and the wisdom of pawns and kings. “Every moment of life is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played,” she writes, “if only you know how to live.” That’s Rooney’s perennial question: What does it mean to live well? It’s a sincere question and Rooney has a sincere answer: connection (E.M. Forster would approve).
And so, like the Dublin author’s previous novels, Intermezzo is a love story: a very straight, very white, very middle-class, wholly interior and unproductively hyped love story. There’s plenty I could say about all of that. It has been said before.
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What’s new? Rooney’s confidence. Her last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), was as much a manifesto as a novel – an author reclaiming her literary identity after a pop-cultural hijacking. It was a bruised and reactive book, as most rejoinders are.
Intermezzo is a chess game and Rooney is in control of both sides of the board. The rhythms of gameplay are built into the architecture of the novel: from its three acts (opening gambit, middlegame, endgame), to its interpersonal moves and countermoves. Rooney also copies the masters here – Keats, Sontag, Lana Del Rey – folding their words into her own (like John Hughes, but with citations). That’s what chess players do: imitate. Weaponise memory.
In chess terms, an “intermezzo” is a moment of rupture, a move that brings an unexpected threat. That is where Rooney begins. Two Irish brothers – Ivan and Peter Koubek – have just buried their father. They will be our opposing players; grief their intermezzo.
Gentle-hearted Ivan is the family chess player: a twenty-something prodigy whose talent is flagging. He can still dazzle the amateurs – play 10 games at once and win them all – but Ivan knows what beautiful chess looks like, and it’s out of his reach. If only life beyond the chessboard didn’t feel so impossible. The world is governed by forces he cannot fathom: opaque rules, impenetrable systems, unspoken expectations.
Ivan’s older brother Peter is a human rights lawyer who burns with the “white light of his own righteousness”. He knows his feminist talking points but treats his girlfriends like garbage. Noble in public; aloof prick in private. He has the usual excuses: shame, insecurity, a cold and feckless mother. The wretched burden of being able to have most of the things that he wants. Peter could be a glorious parody of a monster, were Rooney not so determined to turn him into a romantic lead.
Awkward and adept. Quiet and furious. Book smart and life savvy. Envious and contemptuous. Ivan and Peter are each other’s obverse: white and black. Yet the brothers are more alike than either would like to admit: they have built their lives around winning (or as Peter puts it, “voluntary exposure to defeat”). And with their father dead – the man who kept the peace between them – the Koubek boys are ripe for a reckoning.
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
So far, so promising. The conceit is elegant. The brothers have rich and distinct inner lives. The writing has brio. Enter the women of Intermezzo.
There’s Margaret, Ivan’s much older lover, whose tender – almost maternal – ministrations make him magically better at chess and life (a seducible Mary Poppins). There’s Naomi, Peter’s much younger lover – with her “perfect body” and “animal intelligence” – who tricks him into genuine affection by submitting to his will (“Just use me, just do whatever you want. You can hurt me, it doesn’t matter”).
And then there’s Sylvia – Peter’s beloved and brilliant ex-girlfriend, the survivor of a dreadful (and dreadfully vague) accident that has left her unable to have sex (not that Peter believes her; Sylvia spends a great deal of page-time swatting away Peter’s unwanted erections).
Who will Peter choose? Uninhibited, Naomi who likes it rough, but can’t do the dishes properly and sells nudes online when she’s short on cash? Or chaste Sylvia, the imperious, unf---able beauty who can talk Wittgenstein, but – ever so inconveniently – suffers from crippling pain? It’s the Madonna-Whore dichotomy made flesh. And it’s repellent.
Rooney’s inevitable point is that we’re all “broken” – that there is no such thing as normal (all her novels could be called “Normal People”). But there are ways to write bodies in pain with insight and grace (see Katherine Brabon’s Stella Prize shortlisted Body Friend, 2023), and there is desexed and “ruined” Sylvia.
Here is my dilemma: how much grace can – should – you extend to a work that feels so grotesquely curdled? I don’t have a good answer. But this is not the first time Rooney’s gender politics have felt ripped from an op-shop copy of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. And every part of Intermezzo feels so controlled and intentional, it’s hard to shrug off its cruelties. I’ve always admired Rooney’s sincerity. Her new novel proves how dehumanising sincerity can be.
Intermezzo is a tale of defensive strategies and how they fail under pressure: the ways we wound others to shield our own fallible hearts. Deflections, omissions, delusions, surrenders. The love-as-chess metaphor is an old one (Chaucer used it in 1368), but it does not serve us well. The sooner we abandon that rotten, adversarial script for gendered warfare – all those white knights and captured queens – the better.
Intermezzo is published on September 24.
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