Intermezzo (2024), by Sally Rooney: A Review

Literature, like all artforms, is subjective. Throughout my long career as a reader, there have not been many times when I used the word “bad” to describe a book. I am steadfast in rejecting the one-to-five stars system as irreflective of a book’s achievements and flaws. So, believe me, I do not say this lightly. Intermezzo unequivocally underwhelmed me.

Normal People was ubiquitous on social media in 2018. People loved it. People loathed it. People complained the Booker snubbed it. I read it in one sitting. A novel that was entrancing, impossible to put down. Its characters magnetic. Its anxieties very similar to some of my own. Conversations with Friends was somehow even more accomplished, and it made sense to me when I read that Sally Rooney had written it after Normal People. It was more confident in its probing of intimacy, of the uncomfortable material consequences of disregarding the norms of any given social group. Beautiful World, Where Are You was challenging; probably because of that, it became my favourite. That Sally Rooney would dare to publish a novel as strange as that after the success of Normal People, the TV show, that hinged, in a lot of ways, on people’s obsessions with Paul Mescal’s and Daisy Edgar-Jones’s Connell and Marianne, showed to me that she was willing to write whatever she wanted to, regardless of her reader’s expectations.

I was also deeply invested in the juxtaposition between Eileen and Alice’s environmental angst/existential dread and the marketing campaign around the novel, let’s call it bucket-hat-gate. I talked about Sally Rooney on social media; I published papers on her novels; I bought signed and special editions of her books. With Intermezzo, though, something was a bit off from the outset.

Intermezzo as a Literary Phenomenon

Hailed as the literary event of the year, the publication of Intermezzo was preceded by a massive marketing campaign. It included the standard sending of advanced reader copies to online content creators and journalists as well as the publication of excerpts from the novel to build anticipation. This Esquire piece suggests that Faber’s and FSG’s (Rooney’s British and American publishers, respectively) marketing teams were careful not to repeat the blunders of Beautiful World, Where Are You: instead of creating a random assortment of merch that may or may not relate to the novel, they focused on sending out copies of the work itself. “Swag” was mostly given out at the bookshop events that took place on publication day and were a lot less conspicuous – tote bags, special book jackets, bookmarks – than Lena Durham or SJP in a bucket hat. Still, the ARCs themselves became a coveted item. The reviews also seemed weirdly off. Nobody expects reviews to come out before publication day; even after September 24, however, we had articles like this Guardian piece, which interrogated the reasoning behind Rooney’s absence from the Booker’s longlist without addressing in the review itself the source of her supposed entitlement to it. The reviewer considered this novel to be a step forward for Rooney; she is surely not running against herself, though.

Sally Rooney and James Joyce

Many other reviews focused on comparing Rooney to James Joyce, an intertextual relationship she herself invokes in the Intermezzo reading list she published through Faber, as well as in the novel itself. Rooney quotes from Joyce. Peter’s perambulations in the first chapter do not shy away from their Ulysses affiliation. And yet, besides this initial episode and the occasional Joycean quote, this novel stands as far away from Joyce as it does from Shakespeare in its half-hearted attempt to produce a Hamlet-inspired recreation of maternal failure (except for Normal People’s Lorraine, Rooney’s mothers are predominantly, and quite pointedly, heartless). From its philosophical enquiries to its experimentations with the sentence itself, Intermezzo is a bit of vague effort at reinventing the Rooneyian novel. Some articles have addressed one of the novel’s problems, like its author’s obsession with certain body types and character traits. It is surprising, however, that not much has been said about Rooney’s confusing revisitation of the same characters that she has been exploring since her debut.

We need to talk about Intermezzo‘s problems

Intermezzo is a novel of “white throats,” “milky white skin,” “bare white breasts,” “fine white hands,” and even of “lips pale,” and “skin white and pearlescent wet”. Sylvia’s hand is “fine small […] almost weightless”, her hips are “small”, as are her breasts. Ivan’s face, too, is pale and small. Everybody is “slender” (even Alexei, the dog), or “thin”; everybody wears cashmere all the time, and if they by any chance happen to watch a film on their laptops, it will be a Fred Astaire picture.

Sylvia is an academic who was involved a vague accident, suffering life-changing injuries that Sally Rooney’s narrators never take the time to specify. All we ever learn is that she is in pain quite often, that she cannot have penetrative sex anymore, and that this “ruined her life” when she was 25, so she broke up with Peter not to ruin his as well. I do understand why an author and a publisher would be wary to name the disability (if this is meant to be read as a disability at all) when the narrative openly declares this person’s life has been ruined by it, but besides the problematic element of it, it is baffling to read of this highly accomplished person. Since she is a professor at age 32, having suffered this terrible accident in her mid-twenties, we must conclude that she managed to pursue a highly competitive career after sustaining her elusive injuries and almost dying. She has recovered enough to achieve all that. However, she will not stay with Peter; it would ruin everybody’s lives, apparently. She is repeatedly described by both Peter and Ivan as a part of their family. Peter, however, only met her as an undergraduate, when he was away in Dublin, and would bring her home for the holidays until they broke up. Their parents were separated, but both were quite fond of her. Then she suffered an accident. This is also a character who is later revealed to have caring parents.

Throughout Intermezzo, Peter is meant to be constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown. His father has just died; he drinks too much and does too much coke. He’s dating a 23-year-old who sometimes sells erotic photos online and sometimes doesn’t. She has no job, and he does nothing to help her procure one. The novel vaguely attempts to critique Dublin’s housing crisis, but then it veers away; Naomi is evicted but Peter invites her to live in his flat, then in his father’s house in Kildare (one can only hope her equally homeless friends found a magical solution as well). The thematic thread is abandoned there after Peter complains about it to his friends (never to be seen again). We know nothing at all about Naomi beyond the fact that she goes to college (sometimes) and that she likes to have sex with Peter – until suddenly they both realise that they love each other.

Meanwhile, Ivan, chess prodigy who is actually not that brilliant at chess, falls in love with Margaret, age 36 and still married to an alcoholic. They haven’t divorced yet, but you will never learn why. Margaret, who is described by Ivan as “all pink and white like a flower” (113) and then much later by Peter as “a woman, yes, white and pink her complexion like a flower” (404), has horrible friends who care more about her former partner than about her. Her mother is a monster (of course), and she talks about middle age a lot. Margaret’s biggest struggle throughout the novel hinges on the value she attributes to other people’s opinions of her. She fears being judged for dating a younger man.

The novel’s treatment of romantic/sexual relationships feels strangely outdated. Sure, ageism is very much an issue, and it is true that 32-year-old Peter would be likely to suffer a lot less for dating 23-year-old Naomi than Margaret for dating Ivan. But it’s all blown out of proportion, and I oftentimes felt dragged back to Normal People’s Carricklea, with Peter standing as a Connell Waldron who never matured, remaining obsessed with being perceived as “normal” (a concern Koubek vocalises in the novel). His arguments with Sylvia often reprise Connell’s with Marianne; miscommunication, seeing other people, dragging others into their messy dynamics. Should we blame the people who asked for Normal People: Series 02?

Besides the awkward timelines, sidelined themes and motifs that pile up throughout, and oblique references to literary and philosophical texts (Rooney provides the reader with a guide at the end of the novel), what probably baffled me the most were Intermezzo male-gazey sex scenes. That was the case even – or even specially so – when we followed a scene from Margaret’s perspective (the only constant being that she wants Ivan “very deep inside her”). Sex can be awkward, maybe a tad too talkative in a novel like Normal People, but it was always well-crafted. Sylvia remains interested in sex. She has sex with Peter during the novel; she masturbates. But she cannot have penetrative sex, and this is what she has to say about it: “You know, if I can’t do something properly, I don’t want to do it at all. Maybe that’s part of the problem, I don’t know. I think I would find it humiliating, having to negotiate all that with another person. I would feel I was offering something very inferior.” (127-128)

 On his turn, Peter often finds himself fantasising about hurting or humiliating Naomi, his girlfriend who financially relies on him.

You can do whatever you want with me, she says. Anything you want, you can do. Tracing her cheekbone he smiles at her irresistibly. You’re so pretty, he says. His hand between her legs then, and she shuts her eyes. Wet and open her cunt. You can do anything you want; she repeats. And he could, he thinks. Turn her face-down, hurt her a little, make her take it, tell him how it feels. Degrading. (141-142)

Intermezzo is not a novel lacking in ambition. Besides the literary tradition Rooney makes a conscientious effort to align herself with, she also sets about to explore a wide array of difficult, complex themes that, due to their sheer quantity and vastness are often only addressed superficially and then dropped. Ivan and Peter’s strained brotherly relationship; their grief, mere weeks after burying their father; Dublin’s housing crisis; the fact that Ivan used to be an incel who hated women, but then he just stopped, apparently; there’s also some passing discussion of religion and faith, but Ivan’s white (what else) ceramic braces get mentioned a lot more often; their mother who “abandoned” them and apparently abused their dog, but then suddenly was kind and caring; chess, chess, chess; substance abuse and mental health with Peter and Ricky – Margaret’s bogeyman husband who lurks the narrative but never actually makes an appearance.

Rooney seeks to explore poetic devices and structures in her prose, not unlike many other contemporary Irish novelists (Anna Burns, Eimear McBride, Lucy Caldwell), but does so in a haphazard kind of way. The repetitive use of anastrophe becomes exhausting, especially on a novel of this length (Her head she goes on shaking. Long and glossy blue her black hair). When the reader accepts it as a marker of Peter’s chaotic train of thought, it bleeds into Ivan’s section of the novel as well. Intermezzo repeats itself and Rooney’s other novels again and again. Its confusion could be justified under the logic that it is supposed to portray an emotional landscape in disarray. To quote from a poet Rooney hates, in her fourth novel “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. I can appreciate that we are meant to follow this main thread; that those men are struggling with the death of their father; that they struggle with the people they are and have been; that they feel lonely, angry, believing that someone (God?) dealt them a horrible hand. The execution, though, is not satisfactory at all.

Intermezzo is a sketch of a novel. It could benefit from some unpacking, unfolding, developing, revisiting, interrogating. It is simply not done. All characters say the word “obviously” too often. As a literary performance I certainly can grow to respect it. Rooney has recently spoken of her difficult relationship with fame, her hesitancy to contribute to a further deterioration of the literary industry, with the novel becoming a mere commodity. It is true that she no longer does book tours; she deleted her Twitter account years ago; she does a strictly limited number of appearances for each new release. She is thoughtful and uses her platform to amplify important causes that other people often find inconvenient to address. In her recent Irish Times interview, she said:

I often think it would have been better if I had published my work under an assumed name and stayed out of the public eye,” says Rooney. “It’s not where I belong. I feel a lot of anxiety about my privacy and the privacy of my family and loved ones. But if I refused to speak to journalists or do any public events in connection with a new book, I think it would look as if I didn’t have faith in the book, and that would feel wrong. So I feel a bit trapped by that. On a personal level I’m just not cut out for life in the public eye. I’m a very private person and I like to go unnoticed. That has become harder in recent years, and I struggle with that.

Sally rooney

I suppose what I do wonder is if the encumbrances of fame hang so heavy upon her to the point of regretting signing her name on her books at all, why not simply release new works under assumed names? Why do events at all, why give interviews. If this level of attention is uncomfortable to her (which I do not at all doubt), it would be extremely easy for her to release a book with low stakes. The reason I am saying this at the end of this review is not to attack Rooney or to suggest she is being willingly hypocritical. It is simply that it does suit her and her team to have the publication of her book as the literary event of the year. I called Intermezzo a literary performance, and Rooney’s public persona’s unwillingness to engage is one as well.

Like Intermezzo’s Margaret, I “again and dimly feel confused, as if the story fails to cohere” (239). Some of my friends loved Intermezzo. A considerable part of the press did too. I wonder if my dislike has to do with a change in myself or in Sally Rooney’s writing. There is certainly a shift in perception. In some level, it is as though she drafted a long essay, a sketch of a thesis, and on second thought decided it would work better as a novel. I’m looking forward to her next one.