In Sally Rooney’s novels, unhappiness is a “mark of personal distinction”, rather like “good A-level results”, said The Times‘ James Marriott. And by that measure, the protagonists in her new novel, “Intermezzo”, are as distinguished as they come.
Ivan, a 22-year-old chess genius with a degree in theoretical physics, and his brother Peter, a 32-year-old human rights lawyer, are grieving the death of their father, as well as their own unsatisfactory relationship. Ivan’s career is “stagnant”, while Peter uses prescription drugs to get through his “dreary” working day. Their romantic liaisons are no less troubled. Ivan “burns for” Margaret, an arts centre worker 10 years his senior. Peter’s romantic focus, on the other hand, oscillates between Naomi, a student who sells nude pictures of herself online, and his hurting ex-girlfriend Sylvia.
An intermezzo is a kind of chess move that represents an “unexpected step that requires from the opponent an immediate response”, said The Guardian‘s Alexandra Harris, and the characters here consistently move around each other in a way that can “throw each other off course”.
These age-gap relationships are “irresistibly readable”, said Marriott. “Age matters” here, said Harris. Or rather, as in all of Rooney’s novels, “everyone is trying to work out how it matters”. Thirty-something Peter and his peers are the “autumnal elders” of this novel, looking back to their youth, and perhaps towards their 40s, an “abstract concept on the margins”.
Much is made of what is not said, said Jo Hamya in The Independent. Ivan and Peter meet only three times in the narrative, yet the reader is made aware of something the brothers remain unaware of: “that each brother loves the other, but language fails them.” Perhaps Rooney’s “project in earnest” throughout her work has been to describe the longing for love, to “make legible that noiseless, ordinary longing that can be found everywhere despite – or maybe because of – illness, and, crisis, and logic, and fear, and duty.”
There is a “claustrophobia induced by being kept so close to people absorbed exclusively by their feelings,” said Harris, and “my instinct while reading is to throw open a window” to allay it.
This is a more “philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger” novel than we are used to from Rooney, said Harris. “For all its flaws”, the book is scattered with the “little gifts of psychological and emotional observation that are the most cherishable aspects of Rooney’s talent”, said Marriott.
She reaches the “full potential of her prowess” with this latest offering, said Hamya. Not everyone has waited as patiently as they might have – four novels in, Rooney is still just 33 years old – but for those who have, the reward is “transcendent”.