Knights Errant

In her latest novel, Sally Rooney plays sexual chess

It’s been a couple weeks now since I finished reading Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo, and I still find myself thinking about it. Which is interesting, because there were stretches when I wasn’t sure I was going to finish reading the book. Rooney has always had something of an idiosyncratic style—like eschewing quotation marks—since her debut with Conversations with Friends in 2017. But these traits are downright Joycean in Intermezzo, which is rendered as a stream-of-consciousness narrative in long, flowing paragraphs. Not quite as tough as Ulysses, for sure, but not exactly effortless reading, either. Which, again, is why I almost gave it up.

But I didn’t. And there are a couple of reasons why. The first is that the novel has just enough storytelling drive to keep it going. Intermezzo is a story of two estranged Dubliner brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, who we meet after the death of their devoted father (their mother had long since divorced him and remarried; she hovers in the background). Peter is a successful attorney in his early thirties; his conventional life path of success was interrupted when the love of his life, now a college professor, was in a serious (but never fully explained) accident that has left her sexually impaired, which is why Peter has taken up with a voluptuous college student who sells photos of herself online. Ivan, by contrast, is a drifting twentysomething who has also lost touch with his avocation of chess but finds himself in a relationship with a provincial woman named Margaret, who happens to be Peter’s age. The convergences and divergences of these unconventional romances—narrated in chapter-long interior monologues by these three characters—form the core of a novel about an interlude in their lives. The book’s title is a pun as well as a foreshadowing in that an intermezzo is a chess move in which a player makes an unexpected move to interrupt an opponent’s defense.

As a man who’s twice Rooney’s age, reading her fiction, which I first encountered with her 2018 novel Normal People, always feels a bit voyeuristic. The graphic sexuality and sometimes painful vulnerability her characters express, manifesting in ways that include submission and force, are not always comfortable to read. But one does get the sense that she is capturing a slice of experience for educated millennials around the world for whom things like heterosexual domesticity, material affluence, and a sense of metaphysical purpose have become fraught questions—neither birthright nor instinctively sought, and yet unclear what can or should replace them as aspirations, never mind realities. One of the reasons why I stuck with Intermezzo until the end was that I felt Rooney had written herself into a corner in her handling of Peter’s love triangle in particular, only to discover that in the end what I regarded as a knotty problem became a kind of solution. It’s not one that leads me to reconsider my own choices, but it does help me see that there are people who to all outward appearances are living conventionally middle-class lives but are forging ahead with them on very different premises than my own. This saddens me, not simply because I feel sorry for such people, but also because the complacency in such a remark is tempered by my sense that some of the premises of Western civilization as I have understood them are fading into irrelevance, taking me with them.

It is the work of best fiction that such large questions and internal conflicts get worked out amid what seems like a very simple story. So it is that I say that Sally Rooney is an important novelist, and Intermezzo a worthwhile book.