This article appears in the October 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
By Sally Rooney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
In chess, an intermezzo is when a player opts not to play the move expected of them, instead posing an immediate threat their opponent must address before playing the expected move. This typically happens in between exchanges or tactical combinations, shifting the situation to the player’s advantage. There are more possible chess positions than atoms in the known universe. Even grand masters with hundreds of thousands of positions committed to memory know that at any given moment, the tide can turn and players can find themselves in unknown or even dangerous territory.
Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, is accurately named, especially for a writer whose style and impact has been so well documented. When people talk about Rooney’s contributions to literature, it’s often in the context of her age. She is the voice of a generation, or at least a voice of a generation. The New York Times called her the first great millennial novelist, which says as much about what critics think about millennials as it does her own considerable talent. She writes insular stories, putting a few well-dissected characters under a microscope while the rest of the world is set dressing.
Her particular style has inspired plenty of imitators, but it’s hard to strike a balance between the ultra-specific and the universal. When you write about people in such a granular fashion, you run the risk of irrelevance. Intimacy between two people is everything to them. Does it mean anything to the rest of us? Critics seem to believe that this is the extent of the literary legacy millennials have thus far created for themselves; they focus intensely on personal relationships and their feelings, but it’s questionable whether zooming in so closely will stand the test of time. What else can you expect from youth?
The thing about millennials is that they’re not so young anymore. In an interview with The Telegraph back in 2018, Rooney confessed to the interviewer her internal discomfort with writing novels for a living. “I feel like I could devote myself to far more important things,” she said. “And I have just failed to do that.”
When that interview was published, Rooney had just released her second novel, Normal People, to widespread critical and commercial acclaim. Normal People follows two on-again, off-again lovers, Connell and Marianne, through their last year of secondary school and then at university. Connell wants to be a writer. There’s a moment during his freshman year where he discovers his classmates appear confident but they don’t do the reading, and then through sheer preparation he finds himself at the top of his class. Connell often expresses disgust with the superficiality of literary culture, and is aggrieved at the presumption that wealthy students can bullshit their way through the world without ever truly having to earn their place in it.
Despite his cynicism, the intimacy he shares with Marianne is generative for him, even as their relationship runs into questions. “All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions,” Marianne thinks of their history. “But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that.” The story concludes with Connell becoming as successful as a university graduate in English can hope to be, getting accepted to a prestigious MFA program in New York.
Putting fraternal bonds under the microscope with which she typically analyzes romantic relationships is a natural next step for Rooney.
In Rooney’s last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), Alice is a successful writer who has recently suffered a mental breakdown and is trying to recuperate in a small town in the Irish countryside. She and her best friend, Eileen, write long emails to each other about the superficiality of the pursuit of love, considering that there is so much suffering in the world. Ultimately, neither of them is inclined to change their lifestyle or become more politically active as a result of the injustices they are so quick to name. They’re more interested in proving to themselves and others that they’re smart rather than actually doing something. It’s easier to complain about the world than to change it.
It was good timing for Beautiful World, Where Are You to come out just as the COVID vaccines became widely available and we re-entered the world after lockdown. Three years later, as the housing affordability crisis has only gotten worse, we teeter on the edge of climate catastrophe, and a genocide is under way in Gaza, mild nihilism isn’t right for the moment anymore. It feels tone-deaf to complain about wasting one’s life away as people suffer abroad, while we have seen graphic evidence of their suffering every day for nearly a year. The West cannot afford to wallow in its own neuroses while facilitating horrors on the rest of the world.
Three years later, it seems that Sally Rooney has finally made peace with being a novelist. Intermezzo zooms out beyond the granularity of intimate relationships to explore grief and familial bonds, what ties family members together and what drives them apart. The story concerns two brothers who are reeling in the wake of their father’s death. Peter, 32, is a human rights lawyer in Dublin, and Ivan, 22, a semi-professional chess player.
Ivan and Peter are not close, and their father’s death has exacerbated the dynamics that keep them separate. Peter had a less-than-ideal relationship with his father, while Ivan lost one of the only allies he felt he had.
Peter is torn between two women in his life: his former longtime girlfriend Sylvia, who ended their relationship six years ago after suffering a disabling accident, and Naomi, a younger woman with whom he has a transactional and, despite himself, emotionally intimate relationship. Underlying this central tension is Peter’s intense desire to live conventionally, to be perceived as normal. Once successful and well liked, he has taken to self-medicating with pills and alcohol, numbing the anxiety generated by his intense need to be unexceptional.
His narrative mimics this self-medicating habit: half-formed sentences, erratic thoughts. Jumping to conclusions, making snap judgments about people. He is self-aware about his challenges but less sure of who he is, filtering everything he does through the lens of what it says about him and what other people may think. “All you do is tell lies and talk in clichés all the time,” Ivan says of Peter. “You never say anything true.”
Peter may be an unreliable narrator, but Ivan is also implicated. In meticulously observing the world laid out in front of him, it’s obvious to the reader that he is processing emotions that are totally new to him. He takes in his surroundings and picks apart each detail, using logic to discern his feelings and process them in the context of the moment. His narrative is nothing new for Rooney, bringing to mind a teenage Connell in Normal People, who was frequently trying to dissect feelings too large for him to comprehend.
In the rural village of Leitrim, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman who works at the arts center where a chess exhibition is taking place. Despite her misgivings, they soon begin a relationship, becoming intertwined with one another in rapid time. Everything about their relationship is logistically unsound. Margaret is 14 years older, they don’t live in the same city, and she is recently separated from her husband.
This isn’t a novel about age gap discourse, but Rooney is careful to address the dynamics between Ivan and Margaret that inevitably present themselves, without passing judgment. Like Peter, who is also cursed with the anxiety of advancing in age, Margaret worries about the implications of their intimacy: “She would soon grow older, too old, no longer beautiful, unable to give him children, while he was still a very young man. He didn’t understand or want to know that now: and why should he have to, when they were lying there in bed together, languid, happy, in love, why think about the cruelty of time?”
Ivan has no such hesitation. Once an incel, radicalized by the internet like so many young men his age, he is less misanthropic in love, more inclined to feel a camaraderie with those around him. Being in love with Margaret gives him a sense of purpose in life.
Reflecting on his less-than-stable occupation as a freelance data analyst, Ivan thinks to himself: “Of course, whether or not there is a beautiful woman in his life who enjoys being kissed by him, he still has to pay rent: he accepts this. Nonetheless, it is better to feel hopeful and optimistic about one’s life on earth while engaged in the never-ending struggle to pay rent, than to feel despondent and depressed while engaged in the same non-optional struggle anyway.”
In the grief accompanying their father’s death, both brothers turn further away from each other as they increasingly rely on the women they love, struggling with the weight of their choices. Putting fraternal bonds, or the lack thereof, under the microscope she typically reserves for romantic relationships, Rooney proves that she can cover more ground than what the literary world expects from her. In doing so, she reinforces a central thesis of her work: that intimacy can make people change, deepening their commitment to the collective, and that change is always possible. Intermezzo is a powerful rejoinder to Rooney’s skeptics, proving that the millennial novel can be just as expansive as older literary traditions.
