Sally Rooney’s mesmerizing Intermezzo

Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo displays the maturity and flair of the beloved Irish author

Sally Rooney is a rockstar writer. Some Australian bookshops stayed open until midnight to get her latest into the hands of readers as soon as possible.

At the conclusion of Intermezzo, the new novel from Irish writer Sally Rooney, one of the two brothers at the centre of the story muses: “It doesn’t always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.”

Any student of Irish literature will recognise in those lines an echo of Samuel Beckett, whose 1953 novel, The Unnameable, a darkly comic reverie on the nature of suffering and the meaning of existence, ended with the words: “Where I am, I don’t know. I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

 

For a writer as familiar with her literary antecedents as Rooney, Intermezzo’s reflection of Beckett’s words cannot be read as mere coincidence. Intermezzo is an extended metaphor on Beckett’s themes, a novel that pivots around the question: “Under what conditions is life endurable?” What Rooney’s characters seek to understand is what it means to live – to exist – in a 21st-century world that physically, politically and morally seems on the verge of collapse. Finely crafted and psychologically astute, Intermezzo is a captivating novel, one that demonstrates the steady maturation of Rooney’s craft.

Brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek have just buried their father. After years of disaffection, there is now an uneasy truce between them. Even so, they cannot mask their mutual disdain. According to Peter, Ivan’s personality is as “resplendent” in its “ugliness” as the clothes he wears. Ivan perceives in Peter’s personality a “certain deficiency”. He “hates me”, Peter notes, “because he thinks I’m an arrogant prick, and I look down on him because I think he’s a f..king loser”.

Peter, a barrister and the older by 10 years, meanders through Dublin (Intermezzo also bears traces of Joyce’s Ulysses) bemoaning the “irretrievability of the past” and ruminating on the missteps and miscalculations of his life. He is oppressed, too, by his indecision over the two women he loves: Sylvia, once the great love of his life with whom he now shares a “Platonic life partnership”; and Naomi, a student the same age as his brother, “legally homeless and borderline what you might call a sex worker”.

Ivan is a physics graduate, a “frustrated observer of (the) apparently impenetrable systems (of the world), watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand”. A chess prodigy in his teens, Ivan’s ranking has fallen away in recent years. Nevertheless, he still plays regular exhibition matches. At one of these matches, Ivan meets Margaret, 36 years old and recently separated from her husband. Margaret and Ivan immediately connect. They are two lonely people, neither of whom quite fit in, and in their tentative moments of intimacy there is a “deep animal contentment that goes beyond words”.

Peter, who has always imagined Ivan as “sexless”, is horrified when he hears the news, asking Ivan: “Do you think a normal woman of her age would want to hang around with (you)?” The question severs the little that is left of their relationship.

Explaining chess strategies to Margaret, Ivan points out the “formulaic” nature of the game’s opening gambits and its endgame. The real difficulty, Ivan tells her, is the middle game, where you “just try to play some decent chess”. This metaphor of the middle game – of the “intermezzo” between youth and maturity – underpins the conflict between Peter and Ivan, the testing of their individual strengths and weaknesses, as they each in their own way endeavour to live a “decent” life and to find in that life some abiding value.

While Intermezzo’s early chapters are marked by the deceptively spare, unsentimental prose that has defined Rooney’s early novels, this trademark leanness gives way – just as it did in the underrated Beautiful World Where Are You – to passages of supple, lyrical beauty. A description of a murmuration captures the visual rhythm and pattern of the birds’ flight, a “dark cloud beating with the loud muscular sound of wings”. A “dark sea” is “torn by brittle white breakers”. The final notes of a piano hang “suspended and trembling glittering in the empty air”.

In this, Intermezzo is a novel of accretion, its depth and texture building as more of the brothers’ histories are revealed. Augmenting this effect is the dissimilarity between the brothers’ inner voices; Ivan’s more formal and conventional, Peter’s broken and elliptical, a stream-of-consciousness that reaches for something of what, referring to Joyce’s Ulysses, Rooney called the “radical banality of everyday existence”. Tellingly, it’s a discordance that, as the brothers renegotiate their relationship, appears to diminish.

Intermezzo is not without its flaws. In bringing two men into the foreground of the story (a reversal of her usual female-centred narratives), Rooney unduly mutes her characterisation of the three women. Further, the ideas and images Rooney introduces into the narrative never quite mesh. Pivotal metaphors (chess and music), as well as allusions to writers such as Wittgenstein, Shakespeare and Yeats, are employed too infrequently to reinforce the novel’s meaning. Similarly, philosophical notes about, for example, our relationship with God, the figure of Christ, or the nature of the embodied mind, are too superficially rooted in the novel to imbue it with any deeper significance. None of this, however, makes the brothers’ progress towards their endgame any less enthralling.

What Intermezzo ultimately reinforces – a theme that resonates through Rooney’s earlier novels – is that sexual and emotional intimacy is the key to love, and that love, given and received, is the key to what makes living endurable. To be “given life (through love), yes, and to give life also … (that is the) only answer to death”.

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.