What To Expect From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo

She has been called ‘the voice of a generation’ – an adage she reportedly hates. Either way, Sally Rooney seems to have ditched her typical exploration of ennui-plagued love-lorn millennials for Intermezzo: A Novel, her latest work. It is the author’s first to centre on brothers, first without a female narrator, and first to surpass the 400-page mark. But what do the critics think?

We meet Paul and Ivan in the wake of their father’s death, and Intermezzo traces their tortured psyches on a newly intimate level. It’s being called her greatest work to date; here’s what to expect before you crack open the spine.

Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo: What To Expect

 

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What Is Intermezzo About?

Intermezzo centres on two brothers: Paul and Ivan Koubek. In the wake of their father’s death, both are struggling. Dublin lawyer Paul can’t sleep without medication, while socially awkward loner Ivan’s life is spiralling. And, despite having little in common on the surface, both engage in an age-gap relationship: the thirty-something Paul with college student Naomi, and the 22-year-old Ivan with 37-year-old Margaret. For the two grieving brothers, their father’s death is a new interlude that brings suppressed emotions to light. We meet and learn about their inner lives in alternating chapters as the pair lose and find their footing in their new landscape.

Faber’s official synopsis reads: ‘Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

‘Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

‘Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

‘For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.’

The BBC adapted Rooney’s 2017 debut novel Conversations with Friends in 2022, starring, left to right, Sasha Lane, Joe Alwyn, Alison Oliver and Jemima Kirke.

Intermezzo Reviews

So, what are reviewers saying about Rooney’s latest work? Many are hailing the novel as the author’s best work to date, noting adjustments in style allowing breathing new life and intimacy into archetypal Rooney characters, and focussing on familial relationships allowing her to access emotions that are ‘deeper, messier and more mature’.

Alexandra Harris writes in The Guardian that ‘Intermezzo is an accomplished continuation of the writing that made Rooney a global phenomenon’ – if it is ‘also more philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger’. Harris praises the novel’s intimate exploration of Peter and Ivan’s minds, but also acknowledges the claustrophobia of getting so up close and personal. ‘My instinct while reading is to throw open a window, look at a painting, anything to allay the claustrophobia induced by being kept so close to people absorbed exclusively by their feelings, right now this moment, for each other,’ Harris writes. ‘But art does its job when it pulls us beyond our instincts to experience other ways of being. Intermezzo is itself about life as continuous experiment. The novel suggests that Rooney (at Peter’s age, 33) won’t be settling in the shapes she has established, but holding us, with mixed joy and unease, in strenuous irresolution.’

As for characters, The Telegraph’s literary editor Cal Revely-Calder says Peter – who ‘is the one [character] about whom Rooney cares more’, like Frances, Connell and Alice in Conversations With Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You respectively – is Rooney’s finest portrait of a tortured man since Connell Waldron, and by some way the finest character in this book.’ In contrast, while James Marriott recognises the protagonists are ‘sensitive, cultivated, highly intellectual and have great sex,’ he expresses his disdain, in The Times, for their ‘precious and prissy’ natures, declaring Rooney’s ‘characters just aren’t normal people’, despite revealing the inner lives of those she deems ‘normal’ forever being the author’s fascination.

Rooney has become known for her blank style, leaving nothing to spare. ‘Intermezzo, though, is different,’ Revely-Calder shares in The Telegraph. ‘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.

‘I applaud the endeavour,’ Revely-Calder adds, ‘since Rooney could have written the same book repeatedly and watched the euros pile high.’

Jo Hamya agrees, writing in a five-star review for The Independent: ‘Here at last, we see Sally Rooney discovering the full potential of her prowess: to attend finely to the world around her, to find love in its every complexity having done so, to offer those findings sincerely to others.’

As for how it stacks up with her back catalogue of best sellers, Shahidha Bari writes in the Financial Times that Intermezzo is ‘as clever as her 2017 debut Conversations with Friends, and as engrossing as its 2018 follow-up Normal People’.

Connell Waldron (played by Paul Mescal in the BBC adaptation) is Rooney’s best loved character. (© Enda Bowe/Hulu)

What Does ‘Intermezzo’ Mean?

Intermezzo is a chess term, referring to an unexpected and brutal move that interrupts an otherwise familiar series of moves. However, it’s also a musical term, meaning ‘interlude’. Claire Allfree riffs on this for Tortoise: ‘This novel feels like an intermezzo in Rooney’s career – a connecting link between her early novels and the fully realised works surely still to come.’

Intermezzo Release Date

Intermezzo will be officially published by Faber on Tuesday 24 September 2024.

Some bookshops will be open from midnight to appease eager fans. Otherwise, the easiest way to get your hands on the new book is to pre-order it online.

Faber & Faber, £20, bookshop.org