Intermezzo

Content Warning: This novel and review contain references to sexual content and death.

Sally Rooney, whose 2018 breakout novel Normal People sent a massive storm through the literary world, has continued to make waves with every new work of fiction. The leadup to the publication of her fourth novel, Intermezzo, was met with major fanfare, making it one of 2024’s most anticipated books. Afterward, it featured on as many as 20 “Best of Year” lists, maintaining Rooney’s position as one of contemporary literature’s biggest stars.

Popularity aside, all the hype in the world does nothing to prepare the casual reader for what proves to be a dense but rewarding exploration of the philosophy of human relationships. Rooney is unafraid to plunge into intense discussions on grief, truth, demand, and supply, all of which orbit a deeply emotional tale of sibling rivalry.

Intermezzo weaves between the perspectives of two brothers, Ivan and Peter Koubek. Ivan is a 22-year-old chess prodigy who finds himself going through a dry spell in his career. Peter is a human rights lawyer in his late thirties. When the novel begins, both are grieving the death of their father, whose presence hangs over the narrative like a specter of the past. The past also haunts Peter in the form of his puzzling friendship with his ex-girlfriend, Sylvia, who reminds him of a time he desperately longs to return to. Meanwhile, the future haunts Ivan as he wonders what to make of his adult life should he retire from the competitive chess circuit.

Ivan and Peter’s lives are thrown into disarray by two mirroring relationships. Peter pursues a romance with a much younger sex worker named Naomi, who relies on her relationship with Peter for financial support. Ivan, on the other hand, discovers mutual attraction with a woman named Margaret, who lives in a rural town outside of Dublin and is much closer in age to Peter than Ivan. The two brothers say nothing of their relationships at first, but when Ivan tries to relate to Peter by telling him intimate details of Margaret’s life, Peter is immediately scandalized. This causes a rift between the brothers, who turn to the women to satisfy their emotional needs. The rest of the novel centers on whether these relationships can compensate for or even withstand the brothers’ failure to reconcile, given that the women have their own motivations, which sometimes clash with those of the Koubek brothers.

The Koubek brothers are the emotional center of the novel, and it is in them that the story finds its greatest strength. In the past, Rooney has written more female protagonists than male ones. Yet once Peter and Ivan start to relitigate childhood challenges, Rooney conjures a warmth and tenderness that haven’t been seen in any of her stories thus far.

The downside to this is that the novel struggles to balance its female characters’ development with that of the Koubek brothers. On paper, the women have their own emotional needs—from Margaret’s reckoning with her social ostracism to Sylvia’s fickle attachment to Peter—that the Koubeks cannot meet without first demonstrating their willingness to be transparent or vulnerable for each other’s sake. At the same time, the women conspicuously orbit the men’s lives, making it difficult to see their characters as anything other than accessories to the brothers’ emotional well-being.

The novel benefits from Rooney’s decision to break away from the Koubeks’ perspective from time to time, though this does not happen nearly enough. Naomi’s point-of-view is never depicted, for instance, and while several chapters grant a look into Margaret’s life away from Ivan, this only renders the lack of similar insights into Naomi and Sylvia more conspicuous. This is especially frustrating in the case of Naomi since her needs are largely economic in nature. She experiences eviction and arrest, but their repercussions are practically waved away once Peter swoops in to save her and offer her access to his resources. Naomi has friends, but they have little impact on her story other than to make Peter feel out of place and to become Naomi’s refuge whenever she gets sick of Peter.

Nevertheless, the insistent focus on character needs, both material and emotional, highlights what Rooney does best. Rooney’s novel is the latest demonstration of her ability to explore class dynamics in fiction without overt references to theory or criticism. The juxtaposition of environments and concerns underscores the privilege with which the Koubeks see the world while also pointing out how this limits their ability to positively impact the class conditions of the women in their lives, even as they claim to support feminist ideals. This is best seen in the diversions to Margaret’s narrative, where she faces the claustrophobia of her small country town alone. Ivan is unfazed by Margaret’s discussion of the challenges she faces as a divorced woman, but in his naivety, he fails to truly understand how it feels to be in her shoes, suffering gossip and unable to escape her hometown. This is something that only her perspective can grant the reader, and it does so in some of the novel’s most poignant reflections on the way human relationships simultaneously redeem and ensnare, as in this passage from Chapter 12: “Life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all” (12).

Longtime Rooney fans might find themselves rewarded by the recognition of patterns within her body of work. Stylistically, Intermezzo has most in common with Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Beautiful World, Where Are You. In particular, Intermezzo’s penchant for free indirect discourse doubles down on Beautiful World’s sprawling missives about the world’s alarming state of decay. Yet the novel revives one of the central narrative elements of Conversations with Friends—the illicit age-gap relationship—and uses it to push forward Rooney’s preoccupation with power and class dynamics. If Intermezzo borrows anything from Normal People, it is the juxtaposition of cosmopolitan Dublin with rural Ireland—the county of Leitrim swapped here for the town of Sligo.

None of these comparisons are meant to paint Intermezzo as a retread of old ground. At the same time, there is a clear throughline running through Rooney’s work, and her fourth novel is an attempt to arrive at a more perfect—if not more complex—portrayal of the material circumstances that affect the most abstract things on Earth: human relationships.