sorry yes this is about intermezzo
see also: crying on an airplane
Sorry, I know everyone's already written and posted their little reviews and think pieces about Intermezzo, but unfortunately my timing was misaligned and I was only able to finish the novel this past weekend. Shame on me, etc.
(The thing is (the thing is!) I was going to Dublin for a few days and I didn't want to do the very embarrassing thing of being American while reading Sally Rooney in Ireland, but then I caved and read about three-fourths of it on my way to Ireland, which meant that I was then too self-conscious to read the last hundred pages while out and about in my version’s decidedly non-European yellow hardcover ("American Girl Spotted Reading Rooney on St. Stephen's Green," can you imagine?), so I had to wait until I got back to my hotel every night, tired and jet lagged, to sneak in the remaining pages. You can of course imagine my stress levels.)
If you've been reading the newsletter for a while, you'll know that I generally very much enjoy Rooney's work (including, yes, Beautiful World, Where Are You) in both style and substance. Unsurprisingly, Intermezzo was no exception. I loved it. It was not the first time I've cried on an airplane and it will not be the last.
For context and also because why not, I’ll tell you that I've read a few reviews that more or less align with how I felt about the novel —
wrote a great one for The Wall Street Journal and a complementary two-parter on Rooneyisms for her newsletter; Emma Loffhagen for The Evening Standard had an interesting one that I mostly agreed with ("Love and loneliness have been Rooney’s bread and butter since Conversations with Friends. But in Intermezzo, she writes about the helplessness of love with such searing clarity as to knock the wind out of you."); I enjoyed Heller McAlpin's for NPR; and Ryan Ruby’s review for New Left gave me a lot to think about. A lot of other reviews I’ve perused, respectfully, discuss Rooney and question her role in literature/culture too obnoxiously to create meaningful commentary.The discourse that inevitably follows every new Sally Rooney novel is, quite frankly, unbearable, partly because — for reasons that do not merit the distinction — critics tend to be too interested in Rooney as a person rather than as an author, and partly because questions of relatability — mind-numbing, if I may say so — come to dominate discussion. Aren’t these characters too introspective? Who speaks like that? It’s uninspired.
And not that I subscribe to the theory of relatability when it comes to literature, but reading Rooney and her novels and realizing that well, actually, you do relate to her characters is a bit of an exercise in humility. It can be an awkward conversation with fellow readers, especially those who've admitted to finding the same characters "insufferable" and "unrealistic." But they're so sad all the time, they have all these long-winded thoughts that go nowhere, they're constantly worrying about the world around them while at the same time wondering if loneliness is a permanent or transitory feature of their lives — well, yes!!!
These are familiar concerns to me (and to a lot of people! she said non-defensively), and the desperation with which Rooney's characters pursue their place in the world fascinates me. The recognition that we live in a fucked-up place that can only be improved1 via love and community is not a new literary concept by any means, but the way these characters claw after it so openly — in their minds, at least, if not always their speech — makes it feel fresh.
P.S. I don’t really think this is a novel that can be “spoiled,” but some spoilers ahead, I think!
Maybe because over the last few months I've spent more time with my younger brother than I have in years, I was moved by what I thought of as the main relationship in Intermezzo, that between the brothers Peter and Ivan, in their early-thirties and early-twenties respectively.
I always have the overwhelming thought that a sibling is the last line of defense against loneliness, maybe even isolation as reinvention: this person in the most unique position to share your life for as close to its entirety as anyone will, so long as you manage to accomplish the tiny little feat of looking past every single one of their flaws, the same ones you've been intimately exposed to for most of your life and that may just as easily worsen as they may become lighter. The trick is that, naturally, they can say the same for your own flaws.
There are of course romantic relationships at play for Peter and Ivan, but it's not for nothing that Peter's lowest point in Intermezzo comes after his worst altercation with Ivan; and when, following a previous disagreement with Peter, Ivan thinks of the history of their relationship, and we discover that his biggest regret is saying nothing several years earlier when Peter reached out to him (specifically) for help — a shameful mistake Ivan "deliberately avoided thinking about."
The first disagreement triggers, at almost exactly the middle of the book, what I might consider one of the novel's major conflicts: Ivan blocking Peter's number. If love and loneliness are Rooney's bread and butter, then communication is, by necessity, her load-bearing pillar.
The emails and texts between characters are as part of her novels as their Irish setting — removing Peter’s ability to communicate with his brother, no matter how strained the relationship already was, isolates him even further and takes him on a downward emotional spiral that is not fully resolved until their relationship is repaired at the end of the book. In this, Rooney captures almost perfectly the pain and surprise of feeling misunderstood and underloved by the same people who are supposed to be your last line of defense against that feared isolation.
Towards the end of the novel, when Peter and Sylvia are about to reconciliate and he sees her, he thinks: “… to encounter not only her, the beauty of her nearness renewed, but also himself, the self that is loved by her, and therefore worthy of his own respect.”
In the past (and probably the present), some readers have been resistant to this idea, as if to need love as one needs sustenance is to admit a weakness. Maybe it is. And I guess it can feel debasing, in this continuing age of self-caring away our communities and relationships, to acknowledge that we need people to love us and care for us and be in our lives, that we alone are not enough, that the excruciating minutiae of life can only be borne if in the company of others with a vested, earnest interest in our survival. That's why, I think, what Rooney does is so special — her characters understand this and most of their actions can be explained by a wish, stronger than almost any other, to take their leave of loneliness.
On my flight, as I was reading this novel and trying to keep it together, a woman and her small daughter were sitting next to me. After we'd all settled and consumed our unappetizing dinners, the little girl fell asleep, but for the next few hours, every 20 minutes or so the woman would lean down and press a kiss to her sleeping daughter's temple, as if with a compulsive need to reassure herself that her daughter was there, next to her, and within reach. It's how I felt while reading Intermezzo — the story of five people hopelessly and desperately reaching out to each other to make sure that the people they care about are still there.
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I specifically did not write "tolerated" here — there is a very intentional distinction, I think, between the two in Rooney's mind, one that very Catholically celebrates the transformative, and not merely palliative, power of love.
I love all her books, and agree that the discourse around her work is exhausting (would a male author face this scrutiny?). My only “but” is that her work (with maybe the exception of Conversations) is a bit humorless. I don’t mind the introspection, but the lack of gentle self disparagement becomes a bit tedious.
I have a copy of Intermezzo that I have not yet read and may wait until I forget all the reviews so I approach it with fresh eyes (and thoughts). However, that's not what I want to say. Today I walked into a bookshop and two people were talking about a book they both had read and the bit I caught was about how one of them didn't quite enjoy the novel because she didn't believe the way the characters spoke. To which the other person replied "Exactly, I don't talk like that and don't know anyone who does!" I thought that was very interesting because as readers we all react to a book and its writer from our own unique worldview and direct experience, which is subjective and very reductive. It always fascinates me that most of us (I do this too) often decide whether we like a book or not based on whether we can see ourselves in the characters (how they behave, how they look, how they speak) or not, at the cost perhaps of the literary quality and the writing itself. I've read all Rooney has written while proclaiming I still don't know whether I actually like her books. I quite enjoyed Beautiful World, perhaps this is the novel that has slightly changed my perception about the emotional platitute of her characters but with credit to a commentary by Elif Batuman that was very illuminating as a fellow writer and made me appreciate the novel and what Rooney has achieved as a writer under a different light, regardless of my personal and very subjective taste. I'm very curious to read Intermezzo as it seems from your review to be a compassionate and moving story that may change for good my stance on Rooney (said she who bought the book in French as she was in France on publication day and couldn't wait...)