Landing on bookstore shelves September 24, the Irish writer’s fourth book is a deeply millennial novel. But there’s more to her world view than many people admit, argues The Telegraph’s literary editor Cal Revely-Calder; Sally Rooney is a great political writer – her new novel Intermezzo is proof.
Sally Rooney seems like a contradictory idea. On the one hand, you have the woman — now 33, in rural Ireland — who’s uninterested in fame and has a deep social conscience. In her rare spells in the public eye, she decries the bombardment of Gaza or discusses the notion of Marxist art. On the other, you have the brand — “Sally Rooney”, pinned above three bestselling novels and two major television adaptations — which offers the stories a generation loves to hear told about itself: ones in which people stumble through romance, sex, depression, and all the big little dramas of youth.
In truth, there’s no contradiction here. To see how the strands are linked — cerebral and everyday; marginal and popular — you need only understand that Rooney’s world view is, from first to last, political. Not in a superficial or showy sense: her novels aren’t full of people attending protests or railing about conservatives, though they occasionally do. Rather, a political anxiety lies behind the scenarios she creates, and the figures who act them out. Rooney cares exclusively about “normal people”, as her second novel puts it. She depicts ordinary lives in unremarkable contexts, the sort any reader might know; she then shows those lives being warped by affairs of the heart that also, always, reveal disparities — economic, social, sexual — made flesh in the everyday: failed affairs, unhappy friendships, fractious groups. For these characters to be relatable, in her mind, isn’t just a matter of pleasure, or entertainment, but of identification with people who exist, like you, in a matrix of power.
For instance: all three of her novels to date – Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) – are love stories, the kind of familiar tale in which people fall victim to one another’s hearts. But unlike the commercial fiction that they might seem, at a glance, to resemble, they’re built on meticulous patterns, recurring trade-offs, emotional shifts that you can chart mathematically. Rooney likes central pairs, to each of whom others can be attached: the novels run on motions of energy between a two or a three or a four. In Conversations with Friends, her debut — and still her best novel to date — two young friends and ex-lovers, Frances and Bobbi, become entangled with a married couple, Melissa and Nick. In Normal People, Marianne and Connell keep getting together then breaking apart, moving from school to university as others come and go in their lives. In Beautiful World, Where Are You, two friends, Alice and Eileen, whose literary fortunes sit in stark contrast, form relationships with two very different men.
And so to Intermezzo, Rooney’s fourth. A lawyer in his mid-30s, Peter, sleeps with (and gives money to) a 23-year-old student, Naomi; his younger brother, Ivan, a chess prodigy who is around Naomi’s age, falls for a lonely woman, Margaret, who is around Peter’s. At the same time, Peter has a quasi-partner, Sylvia, who was once his girlfriend, but, since an accident, has been incapable of penetrative sex; she knows about Naomi, just as Naomi knows about her. Peter and Sylvia lack closeness in the physical sense; Peter and Naomi in the emotional one. So, too, there is an emotional wall between Peter and Ivan, felt now more intensely by one, then more by the other. You have the sense, throughout, that you could plot them all on a grid, one whose dimensions would fluctuate. The action of Intermezzo, as usual with Rooney, comprises the interaction of these elements, as they meet and talk and argue and eat and drink and go to bed, generating more and more friction until the system overheats and begins to fail, leaving one character — this usually happens in Rooney, too — on a psychological brink. In chess, the term “intermezzo” refers to a familiar series of moves that an unexpectedly brutal one interrupts.
Rooney has disavowed any responsibility for being her generation’s “voice”. But Intermezzo, as it arrives in 2024, seems to me a deeply millennial novel, in that it’s suffused not just with the concerns of her previous books, but also with an elegiac awareness of how we eventually stop being young. (You wouldn’t know it from some commentators, who still talk about avocados and wokeness, but many a millennial is in their mid-40s today.) This desire to look in the rear-view mirror before the years without consequence are gone constitutes much of Peter’s personality — and though Faber & Faber frame Intermezzo as a tale of two brothers, figuring out their emotional issues in the wake of their father’s death, it’s clear that Peter is the one about whom Rooney cares more. (Her children are never equal: Frances and Connell and Alice were her previous favourites.)
Every time, for example, that Peter winds up at Naomi’s door, and hangs out with her Gen Z flatmates, he knows he’s out of kilter, not shockingly — he isn’t yet old, exactly, and she genuinely likes both the sex and the cash — just slightly and perceptibly, to a degree that seems not seedy but gently sad. As if he were caught between repression and acceptance, on the cusp between feeling young and becoming old, he stands in her flat, at a party, and “wonders sometimes what her friends must think of him. Competent, intimidating, the grown-up. Or lonely, desperate: the absolute cringe, imagine. Male friends jealous maybe. The sheer blouse, her perfect pointed breasts. She’s talking to him now.” Comic strains are audible here, in the realisation that the object of his thoughts is really a subject, and trying to get his attention; but emotions pulse in the writing, too, clear and unsure. Peter, whose chapters supposedly parallel Ivan’s but soon accrue greater force, is Rooney’s finest portrait of a tortured man since Connell Waldron, and by some way the finest character in this book.
Rooney’s style is often misunderstood. You hear it framed as “blank” or “flat” or “numb”, an inspiration for all those millennial novels that booksellers, or bad critics, group together as “sad girl lit”. In truth, she writes pure television. Her sentences strive for seamlessness; her dialogue has pace and snap; chapters end satisfyingly when a scene has gone through its arc, as if an episode were complete and the next were set to auto-play. Such has been her approach since the opening page of Conversations with Friends, and it has made her work, in turn, ripe for the screen. (If she planned that from the beginning, well done to her.) On the rare occasions when she has altered the formula, it has never really worked. There was little reason to lace Beautiful World, Where Are You with overlong emails in which two characters discuss critical theory and literary fame, except that these subjects were probably on Sally Rooney’s mind.
Intermezzo, though, is different: as the passage above suggests, Rooney has, for swathes of this novel, made a consistent attempt to change her style. She tends to write declarative sentences, rarely front-loaded with subordinate clauses or borne down by descriptive flourishes. Here, to conjure psychological turmoil, she cuts the verbs, shortens the sentences, while preserving the rhythm overall: the flow is choppier, but steady enough. The effect, in these passages, seems a little like Eimear McBride, with less of the savagery, or Samuel Beckett, with less crystallisation. A representative passage:
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Advertise with NZME.“Train rattling over the coast. Dark sea torn by brittle white breakers, gulls floating black against grey sky. Every option exhausted. Nowhere left to hide from himself. Back to the flat, trapped alone again in the incessant repetition of his own thoughts, sick, paranoid, drugging himself to sleep. Unwelcome, unwanted anywhere, unloved. No, no, he can’t, he can’t do it. Go looking online he thinks, easiest, painless, fastest most painless, easy foolproof. 12 simple pain-free methods that can’t go wrong.”
I applaud the endeavour, since Rooney could have written the same book repeatedly and watched the euros pile high. (Faber & Faber, whose fiction list has turned fairly commercial, might have preferred that plan.)
In the more stylistically familiar passages, Rooney’s prose has the same virtues as ever. She has an easy way with normality: it’s difficult to make people sound normal, and most novelists don’t get close. Everyday talk between people who care for each other is complex and riddling, almost a private language; yet it’ll seem so transparent, so banal, to anyone listening. To frame both sides of that divide, in and out, requires adeptness with perspective and voice; and Intermezzo handles its dialogues well, sketching people with delicate touches, from the way Naomi asks small off-hand questions, trying to get a foothold with Peter, to the way Ivan asks almost none, trying to assert himself before Margaret. It captures distress, too, with silky skill, as when Peter imagines Sylvia compelled, when he mentions Naomi, “to witness from a polite distance her own replacement”, or when he feels out of control himself, and embarks on a page-long internal monologue that zigzags between pained honesty and ironic clichés.
Yet Rooney has her limitations as a novelist. The downside of thinking politically is that you may know, or think you know, what you think. For instance, her view of sex — that it’s a question of power – seems to be fixed; perhaps she’s right, but her preferred examples are equally fixed. In bed, Naomi whispers to Peter “you can do whatever you want with me”, an exact repetition of what Frances whispered to Nick — also older, also richer, also emotionally out of bounds — back in Conversations with Friends.
The same motifs recur without much variety in the score. Another issue, also long-standing, is Rooney’s monomaniacal focus on her principals. While this may replicate the obsessive quality of love – it works best in Normal People, a two-hander with cameos — it drains the richness from her scenes. Her minor figures, in whom she never seems interested, tend to be thinly drawn: here, Naomi’s immaturity is conveyed by her inability to wash a plate, compounded by her pride at having tried. Popular culture rarely intrudes: when a character in Intermezzo sings Lana Del Rey in the shower, it has a startling effect, and doesn’t happen again. (I suspect that there’s politics here, too: that Rooney herself is repelled by celebrity, or brands.)
At the heart of Rooney’s characterisation is a quality that can pull both ways: her fondness for brilliance. It’s engrossing and impressive, mostly — until it tips into a flaw. No decent fiction critic should care too much for biography, but recall that, as she once wrote in The Dublin Review, when she was a student she was “the number one competitive debater on the continent of Europe”; then note how, just as we read of Bobbi, in Conversations with Friends, being appreciated for the “clear, brilliant sentences” with which she cowed her friends, we now read of Peter and Sylvia, who met in “the old debating days”, discussing how Peter is much too hard on Ivan — and we may notice, all of a sudden, that it isn’t a discussion at all. Rooney, like Plato, has had the whole debate in her head, resolved it in Sylvia’s favour, then written it out. Peter’s role, like Socrates’s patsies, is to enter the lists and lose. In such moments, Rooney’s enterprise seems temporarily hollow: her characters make sense less as human beings than as aspects of a single intelligence.
And yet, while it occasionally overpowers the narrative, that intelligence gives Intermezzo its coherence and structure — even its underlying philosophy. The counterpointed views, the narrative focus, the compelling style of prose: they’re different means of giving fictional events their undeniable force. For all the griefs and regrets in this novel, all the misreadings and mistakes, as the characters try to figure out what they feel, we never lose sight of their capacity for love. If Rooney’s work has a guiding belief, I think it’s something such as this: no one is ever truly alone. Some might see that as obvious, a truism. Others would call it a reason to live.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, $47, published by Allen & Unwin. Available September 24.
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