It’s not a book for summer. Despite the yellow checkered cover, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, which came out in September, is most certainly a winter book. The yellow is wrong anyway, not the yellow of sun, but instead tinged with a sickness, the checkered pattern alternating between subdued yellow and gray. Like a jaundiced hue, the cover blends in with the orange and marigold seats on the subway, configuration and color of a D train about to be defunct.
Shortly after Intermezzo came out, my ex bought me a copy at Target. It was from the Brooklyn Target in Caesar’s Bay with a view of Coney Island on one side and the Verrazzano on the other. It was still warm, the waves outside the box stores lapping like summer. And I thought, how wonderful it must be to have every type of literary success. Rooney is equally displayed at indie bookstores, on the cool hotgirl IG pages, and also under the bright, antiseptically illuminated aisles of big box stores. But it took several attempts to truly commit to this book.
Between starting it and finishing it, I’ve read two Percival Everett books, The Easter Parade, some non-fiction, and a lot of poetry. I didn’t have this experience — visceral dread, though only in the beginning — with Rooney’s other books. Like everyone else, it seems, I read much of her other work quickly, voraciously. But the process of starting this book was difficult. I didn’t like the stilted dialogue.
Intermezzo is about two brothers navigating the death of their father while juggling their other obligations, including work, family life with a mother that is supposed to be difficult and cold but isn’t really, and dating.
It begins with Peter, the oldest brother, who is a thirty-two-year-old lawyer (or barrister as they say in Ireland). He thinks, rather patronizingly, of his younger twenty-two-year-old brother Ivan who is a chess whiz though still often socially immature: “Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of adolescence.”
Much of the difficulty with the opening comes with Peter’s syntax. Peter is annoying and clipped. I hate the way he talks. Everything a fragment. Profound, it’s supposed to be. Really though. It’s just annoying.
Rooney mostly alternates interiority between the two brothers throughout each chapter, and Peter’s syntax isn’t the only tiring part; his perspective throughout the book can irritate, as he juggles his feelings for two different women: a younger, new girlfriend and his ex whom he dated for six years before she had an “accident” and seemingly can’t be intimate like she once did.
Grief is supposed to be an overarching theme but it’s absent for most of the beginning, not truly looming like it does in real life when even ordinary things can make you remember someone and weep. Rather than truly explore and navigate loss and relationships with (or to) a deceased loved one, Intermezzo is mostly a book about relationships with the living, with Rooney’s characters especially obsessed with age gap relationships.
The age gaps are around ten and thirteen years, with Peter dating a younger woman and Ivan pursuing Margaret, who has been married before. The reverence and anxiety reserved for the age differences of these characters is steeped in a psychic guilt that makes it seem like the most haunting taboo legally possible, which isn’t always true, even to the worrying characters, but it’s etched into the psychology of the book.
“And what about your brother? How do you think he would feel about the fact that I’m older than he is?”
For a few seconds Ivan did nothing. Then she watched in strange stillness as he sank down onto the floor, sank with his head in his hands until he was sitting on the floor by the radiator, hiding his face. The dog padded over and snuffled at him curiously, probing at his neck, his ear, tail loosely wagging.
Quietly Margaret said: “You’ve told him already.”
That’s not to say Intermezzo doesn’t explore uncomfortable moments well. The fact that Ivan has braces and is fresh out of college makes Margaret’s behavior seem desperate and potentially predatory. But Rooney tries to capture too much by making the brothers attempt to mirror each other with Peter dating the young and broke Naomi, who he keeps at a distance.
Intermezzo wants to be very subversive but constantly reverts back to conventional morality. In that vein, Rooney makes sure to include noble reasons for every character’s bad act. When Ivan criticizes women, it’s almost justified by explaining the change of his thought process once he’s finally in love. When Peter struggles with feelings of intimacy for two women, it’s because both women seemingly allow it. There’s always a justification for a bad action and a near-desperate attempt at proving the morality for these characters that doesn’t often ring true.
I did, however, become very invested in the world Rooney created once I got past the opening. I even teared up at the ending, no matter that the resolution was so pat, more akin to commercial fiction than richly imagined literary endings (though Rooney, of course, is both now).
Still, I could never really get over the fact that Rooney’s writing is so terse. The formula in the male dialogue of removing the sentence’s subject felt like commercial romance — that strain of attempting to capture unaffected nature by portraying men with clipped speech to highlight masculinity or, rather, their supposed tragedy. Years ago, I saw a performance of Beyond the Horizon by Eugene O’Neill and an actor whispered. He was attempting to convey a lack of strength but it didn’t translate. No one could hear him, even me, the youngest of the mostly gray-haired audience. Intermezzo explores age and time and relationships, all these things that make us human. It was written, in some ways, as a Book, intended to be something graver by dealing with less frivolous things, perhaps — but the seeming frivolities of her past books did add variety. Will this age well? Maybe. Rooney might have her eye on the next fifty years.
It does feel different, perhaps intentionally so. I’m almost the same age as Rooney. It’s telling that her dust jacket bio now no longer has her birth year listed. She was a young writer, and now perhaps, with this book, she is just a writer.
Vanessa Ogle is a poet, writer, and educator. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Business Insider, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Mother of 0 and writes the Substack newsletter Class is in Session.