I remain unconvinced that this tale of two grieving brothers and their messy relationships with women in their lives needed to be told over four hundred pages, but all in all I enjoyed Sally Rooney’s latest.
I didn’t love Beautiful World, Where Are You, which for me only came alive in its last few chapters, so this novel does feel like a return to form. I still believe that it could have been pruned by a hundred pages or so without a significant loss, but at least I didn’t feel like I had to plough on till the very end to get to the actual good stuff.
Intermezzo follows two brothers who at first glance appear to have nothing in common besides their decidedly non-Irish last name that subtly marks them both as outsiders. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his early thirties, working humanitarian causes and hiding depths of nihilistic despair under the exterior of success and arrogant confidence. His brother Ivan is ten year younger, a competitive chess player still wearing braces and acutely aware of his own social awkwardness. The two have just lost their father, who has lost his long battle with cancer, and haven’t been close for some time.
In the aftermath of their loss, Peter and Ivan make an attempt to connect, but they really look for solace in unconventional and potentially disastrous relationships rather than each other. Ivan, whose progress through the rankings has stalled since their father’s illness, finds himself entangled with Margaret, a 36-year-old venue manager still technically married to her estranged alcoholic husband. Peter’s love life is messier still, divided between his old soulmate Sylvia, academic, coolly intelligent and incapable of physical intimacy after an accident, and Naomi, a student of Ivan’s age teetering on the brink of homelessness, sexy, chaotic and devil-may-care. Both age-gap relationships raise uncomfortable questions that Peter, Ivan and Margaret would rather not confront.
Intermezzo takes place after all the big traumatic events in the characters’ lives, so not much actually happens in the course of the book. Instead, Rooney takes a leisurely time to really get inside her flawed, messed up characters and complicated relationship dynamics, and explore them through a magnifying glass without leaving a tiniest corner unexposed. The novel moves between the brothers’ perspectives, with the writing styles reflecting their personalities and state of mind. Peter’s chapters tend to be a meandering stream of consciousness, weaving together thoughts, sensations, conversations and vividly observed fragments of the environment he’s in. Ivan’s narrative is meanwhile is more orderly and finely articulated. Margaret, much more conscious of social norms and how her relationship with Ivan might be perceived by the outsiders, also gets to have a say in Ivan’s chapters.
At this point I’ve decided that I require long breaks after the novels written in this free-flowing, punctuation-shunning style with its dense slabs of paragraphs and deliberately garbled syntax. However I can’t deny that Rooney is a marvellous writer who is very, very good at it. Even if I found her writing a tad overindulgent here, she never fully lost me. Just when all that rumination and introspection become too much, here comes a truly electric dialogue scene, or a beautiful turn of phrase, or an incisive observation that cuts deep. Rooney uncovers how easy it is for people to have a distorted, misunderstood view of each other, coloured by grief, wishful thinking, prejudice and insecurities.
While Margaret is a well-rounded character of her own, the women in Peter’s life feel rather more two-dimensional until just before the end. This might have been necessary for dramatic purposes in order to show how wrong and confused Peter really is, but it still bothered me. I recall that I had a similar complaint about Normal People, where the supporting characters were quite forgettable, but in the end it wasn’t a deal breaker for either book.
yggdrasille.com 