The challenges in reviewing Sally Rooney’s brilliant new novel, Intermezzo (Faber and Faber, 2024), are daunting. For starters—and I never thought I would say this about any novel, particularly a contemporary one—it is nearly perfect. Second, a traditional review would have to include constant spoiler alerts since plot elements and elements of the characters’ back stories are revealed with such exquisite timing and to such powerful effect that the reviewer has to avoid mentioning any of them.
Intermezzo chronicles a relatively short span of time: a period of overlapping crises in the lives of five people—two men and three women, who live in and around Dublin. Rooney shifts perspectives and attention among the five—in order of first appearance, their names are Ivan, Peter, Naomi, Sylvia, and Margaret—moving among the individuals with a deft storyteller’s touch. Rooney can pack a lot of character-revealing information into small passages, as in these opening lines, from inside Peter’s head: “Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent. On such occasions, one could almost come to regret one’s own social brilliance.”
Throughout, there are beautifully described scenes overlaid with keen observation. When we first meet Ivan, “the young lad” with “braces on his teeth,” for example, we are afforded a subtly brilliant, telling description of what he sees. He has just arrived at a meeting hall where he is to be the guest of honor and is waiting while his hosts set up furniture. A woman walks into the hall.
“She happens to be noticeably attractive, which makes her presence in the room at this juncture all the more curious. She has a nice figure and her face in profile looks very pretty. After a moment Ivan sees that the other men, although they have not directly acknowledged the woman, seem to be behaving differently in her presence, lifting the tables with heftier motions of their arms and shoulders, as if the tables have become heavier since she walked in. Showing off in front of her, he realizes: and he even seems to see her smiling to herself, maybe because she has come to the same conclusion, or maybe just because they’re all pretending to ignore her.”
Like Rooney’s three previous novels, this one is somber in tone throughout. But it is laced with well-timed humorous passages, like this one: “To remember that God is not the nice man Jesus, who liked everybody and went around healing the sick; that God is, on the contrary, the one who makes people sick, who condemns people to death, for incomprehensible reasons. Jesus the healer, the listener, teacher, friend of sinners, seems to Margaret’s mind to be practically on the brink of murmuring: Sorry about my dad.”
One thing that has always stood out to me about Rooney is her unique prose, which is at once laconic and ornate. It is as if she inhabits some previously uninhabited space halfway between Hemingway and Nabokov. She writes with great restraint—there’s nothing showy about her prose—but at the same time with remarkable beauty and a comforting rhythm. You can get so lost in her narrative’s tone and pace that you look up after reading for what feels like a short time to discover that you’ve been wrapped up in her prose for a couple of hours. She has a way of making you not want to leave.
A great deal of that is due to the emotional investment you find yourself putting into her characters. Simple sentences can generate enormous sympathy in the reader, like this one: “The human mind, for all the credit he was just giving it a minute ago, is often repetitive, often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts, which in Ivan’s case are usually regretful in nature.” The amount-of-information-per-word value in sentences like that is boggling.
It has been a little dismaying to see the general tenor of reviews of Rooney’s work falling along the lines of her being a spokesperson for the millennial generation, or too focused on a narrow slice of society, of displaying either the right or wrong politics. Those reactions come from admiring and critical reviewers alike, none of whom seem to notice what a remarkable artist she is. It is as if we have decided to disregard the aesthetics of writing and focus solely on political or social content—a terrible disservice to writers and readers alike.
There is so much more I would love to say about this novel. You can thank me later for not doing so.
Thank you, Fred. I’ve put Sally’s book on my reading list, mostly due to your analysis of her skill at conveying so much in well-chosen phrases. Other reviewers stumbled over these observations.