Despite its preoccupation with grief and bereavement, Irish writer Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, can also be strikingly funny.
‘Mildly drunk, or concussed”: CS Lewis’s gloss on the feeling of grief holds good for the two Dublin brothers at the heart of Sally Rooney’s new novel. Ivan Koubek, an awkward 22-year-old chess prodigy, and the older, more worldly Peter – a successful lawyer – are reeling from the impact of their father’s death. Bereavement colours their dealings with the women in their lives. For Ivan, this means Margaret, an older, recently divorced arts administrator with whom he enters a relationship, while Peter is torn between former lover Sylvia and his reckless, much younger girlfriend Naomi.
In Intermezzo, that is to say, Sally Rooney explores relationships. But that’s a bit like saying Lionel Messi knocks a ball around. The lives of these five people – albeit this is a “drama with two principal actors” – are rendered in exquisite, astonishing fullness as Rooney orchestrates their interactions through sex, conversation, the fraught flux of thought. But where she excels is not just in the delineation of character but also its development. With tremendous delicacy of touch, she makes these characters clearer to the reader and also stranger to themselves: Ivan grows in assurance, partly through his burgeoning intimacy with Margaret, while Peter’s facade of suavity cracks.
There are shades of Ulysses in the relationship between the Koubeks. Though brothers, they share something of the surrogate father-and-son dynamic of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they traverse their distinct but overlapping Dublins. And indeed, this is a very Dublin novel – in setting but also in style. Other writers might fret in the shadow of James Joyce. Not Rooney. Her sense of “the onwardly flowing blur of all experience” converges gorgeously with Joycean stream-of-consciousness. It’s all here: the gruff telegraphese (“Doesn’t bear thinking about. Whole thing patently insane”); the lyrical inversions (“Quiet the street and cool under the lamplight”); and the lovely jumps and ellipses of a mind in full hectic career: “The image was so intense it was kind of sexy, kissing her in front of all those people, allowing everyone to presume, and correctly, that they, which was true.”
You finish Intermezzo with a deepened feeling for the wonder of life, the strangeness of humanity, the vigour and reach of the novel.
If her easy engagement with Joyce speaks to Rooney’s assurance, so, too, does her graceful unfolding of the novel’s central motif. Chess is clearly a game that Rooney has come to know deeply – its procedures, its culture, its lore. And while “the chess aspect of this story” (as one character calls it) is not overstressed, the game does accrue significance as the novel develops. As the action makes clear, it is not only chess players who expend tremendous reserves of energy – intellectual and emotional – making codified moves that ramify alarmingly. Powerful struggles played out at close quarters in an atmosphere of surface tranquillity are the game of literary novelists as well as grandmasters.
In one sense, the “intermezzo” of the title is the stunned lull of bereavement, the intermission before normal life resumes. But it’s also a comment on Rooney’s method. She finds resonance in the small, unnoticed moments between more overtly dramatic events. A train ride, a languorous morning in bed, a swim, the halting pas de deux of a telephone call (“Is it his turn to begin talking again now, or it’s still her turn?”), a yellow sycamore leaf on a windshield, a sheep’s dirty fleece “silvered with rainfall”: these are the commonplace threads with which Rooney weaves this uncommon, spellbinding novel.
For all its preoccupation with grief and bereavement, Intermezzo can be strikingly funny. There are flashes of absurd humour, as when Ivan imagines what his dog is thinking, or when Margaret envisions a diffident Jesus “practically on the brink of murmuring: Sorry about my dad …” The dialogue, too, is glorious: no smart repartee or one-liners, just people fumbling to discover their feelings and thoughts in the act of giving voice to them. And almost every page displays Rooney’s gift for the visual image: “Woman reading a folded-up newspaper, mottled damp at the edges.”
If it seems at times understated, even muted, this novel knows what it’s doing. The close attention to what Margaret calls “the trappings of ordinary life” has a cumulative impact. The emotional force of the final few pages, patiently earned by the preceding 400, when the brothers finally have it out in the wake of one of Ivan’s tournaments, is almost overwhelming. Among the novel’s myriad virtues, it conducts a master class in the arts of structure and pacing.
The hype surrounding Rooney’s work has been considerable, entirely warranted, and in some sense beside the point. Whatever zeitgeisty buzz may be held to have accelerated her rise, Sally Rooney has emphatically arrived as the finished article, the real thing, a vastly accomplished novelist. Book by book, she confirms her status as one of the major artists of our time. You finish Intermezzo with a deepened feeling for the wonder of life, the strangeness of humanity, the vigour and reach of the novel. You can’t really ask for much more.
