Intermezzo – book review

Sally Rooney gives us here an almost perfect story. Five main characters, interlinked, each well rounded and complicated with their own goals and challenges, a set up which could go one of many ways, some deep subplots and an ending all tied up. Sounds a bit contrived, perhaps? There is nothing very experimental, no sweeping poetical passages, nothing clever. No ramping up the heartbeat with triggers and button pushing. It’s just a story of five people. And with that simplicity, it is exceptionally good.

Ivan is a socially awkward chess geek. Spend a hour inside his head and you’ll fall in love, though he never stops being awkward, or insecure or confused. He’s just more conscious than most of us about the inexplicable. Like when he tries to find a home for his dog and finding lots of websites explaining how to get a dog out of care, but none on how to put a dog in.

How often in his life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life.

Obviously it’s a frustrating problem with the dog, but Ivan takes the lack of structure personally. I can relate a bit to this. How does everyone else manage to get a ticket refunded online, or know where to recycle half filled paint cans? Daily life is difficult and Ivan owns it. But when things feel right, he has the sense to know that, too.

Ivan’s brother Peter is a high earning lawyer who thinks in staccato and we never know where he wants to be, or which of his two women he wants to be with. He puts off going home by drinking.

Suddenness and finality of November evenings. Dark cold midnight by six o’clock. Packs up his laptop in his briefcase, puts on his coat, gloves. Outside, buses trundling frills through standing water. Said he would swing by Matt’s birthday. Thirty-three. Age Jesus was when he. So Barbara says. Is that right? Above in the Hacienda, bending his head to try and hear. And it actually says that in the Gospels, or? Must be getting old, can’t make out a thing she’s saying. Laugh when she laughs. Gold earrings fluttering. I hear congratulations are in order. Wasn’t that your case today? Backwards in high heels. Right, right, he says. Grinning at him. Hope you’re proud of yourself, profiting off our misery. She’s joking. Smile back at her. Damned if you do and all that.

So beautifully Sally Rooney. Every word placed on the page. “Outside, buses trundling frills through standing water“. You almost move your legs so you don’t get splashed. She’s evocative in very few words.

Peter’s long-term but now ex-girlfriend, Sylvia, really deserves a whole book to herself. She broke up with him after a bad accident that left her in lifelong pain, fragile and unable to provide the physicality Peter needed in a partner. This is very complicated but Rooney will not spoon-feed us on how we should think about Sylvia. Peter still loves her but she won’t have him back – probably because what he wants is their lives back as they were before the accident. She encourages him to get on with his new, much younger lover.

Peter’s new, much younger lover is Naomi, a student who plays with the sugar-daddy thing and is sexually willing but wants cash and presents. She does some sideline hustles with explicit phone work and sells a few drugs. She is the only character’s voice we don’t hear. I was left as unsure as Peter when she got kicked out of her house and moved in with him – what is Naomi to him and he to her? Peter tells both women about the other and is in love with them both.

Peter and Ivan don’t get on. The recent death of their father has rocked both of them badly. Did they love him enough? Did he know? The boys do not understand each other and they grieve separately, angrily. Then Ivan, the brother a decade younger than Peter, finds someone he really likes and it’s such a beautiful and careful relationship. Pure gold. I am delighted that Rooney can write something so lovely, a change from her usual damaged pairings. We see the developing relationship from both Ivan and Margaret’s viewpoints. Of course it is not perfect, there is something they have to think through in the relationship, something that Ivan is reluctant to tell his judgemental brother.

Sally Rooney really hits her stride with her writing here. Is the turning of sentences an Irish thing or particular Sally Rooney? Anyway, it’s gorgeous:
– And holding tightly closed his eyes he tries to breathe as normal.
– Small and clean her kitchenette under the yellow glow of the fan light.
– Touching with his hand her head.
– Clink of teaspoon also he hears.
– Clammy her hand holding when she looked up into his eyes.

All these phrasings give a pleasing lilt to the narrator’s voice, something that keeps you grounded in this place, with these people.

I said at the start that the ending was all tied up. But it’s not predictable. That’s Sally Rooney. if she’d given me the ending I wanted I would have liked the book less.

Give this book confidently to everyone.