Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review by Walter Cummins

Sally Rooney’s central charterers in Intermezzo, her fourth novel, talk quite a bit, just about every time they interact, hashing and rehashing the complications of their relationships, as if finding the right words would lead to a resolution. Rooney seems quite aware of the limitations of that hope, having chosen an epigraph from Wittgenstein: “But don’t you feel grief now? (“But aren’t you now playing chess?”). Ivan, one of two central brothers, does play chess, though not as well as he hopes to. Yet all those in the novel are, in effect, making moves on the game board of life. In chess an intermezzo is a pause for players to regroup or refresh themselves. Are the events of the novel giving them such an opportunity?

The opening sections place with the people—the pieces—in starting positions. But can their next steps be anticipated and planned without the direction of chess’s formal rubrics? Does life have strategies to guide us?

As Rooney explains in her Notes, she returns to Wittgenstein for additional passages, including, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” What about a person you love or think you love or, conversely, think you hate? Rooney also cites her quotations of lines and phrases from major literary writers like Shakespeare, Eliot, Wordsworth, Yeats, Joyce, Hardy, and Larkin. Can the greatest help us comprehend our situations? Or is there a better path to understanding? Does mastery of chess, hoped for by Ivan Koubek, lead to mastery of life? Are the ecstatic love wrigglings of a dog more convincing displays of love than anything humans can express: “Alexei runs in a circle around Ivan’s feet, leaping, scampering, lifting his thin head intermittently to lick at Ivan’s hand. He even bows down playfully like a puppy and lets out a kind of elongated howl of excitement, flicking his tail.”

Humans also have physical outlets, as Ivan and, his much older lover, Margaret, do when their mutual sex is both tender and passionate. Yet they underline their physical actions with talking during their passion—thoughts, reactions, questions. Ivan’s brother, Peter, ten-years older, engages in sexual activity that is not as mutually fulfilling because the woman he truly loves, Shiela, has been left in constant pain after an accident, intercourse impossible for her, and because his younger mistress, Naomi, Ivan’s age, desirable as she is, involves guilt and uncertainty: “Sexual humiliation, little bit of a turn-on maybe” — “Why does everything have to be so complicated? He knows why. Flashing eyes of two animals through the undergrowth. Yes: what they want from each other.”

In addition to talk and sex, some characters find themselves in another kind of physical contact, the edge of violence—a shove or a punch expressing fury but not exploding into full punching and pounding: “Ivan has pushed him, Ivan has raised his hands and pushed him back tripping hard against the fireplace, Ivan, standing there before him, breathing heavily, yes, he did it, he shoved him, hands to his chest. Heat of rage flaring inside him now, hot light, Peter reaches out and slaps him hard across the face with the back of his hand. Behave yourself, he says.”

For all the pages of talking, the scenes of lovemaking, and the brief outbursts of hostility, how can people fully understand each other? Is it as impossible as comprehending a lion talking? The entire novel and the relationships of the people within it reveal how they hope to transcend the traps of all that separate them.

The closest relationship to fulfillment is that of Ivan and Margaret. But guilt makes her hesitant because he is only twenty-two and she thirty-six, and because she is still legally married to an alcoholic. Peter, more deeply troubled than Ivan, is tormented that his love for Shiela can never be fulfilled and because he struggles with the question of whether his attraction to Naomi can ever be a substitute. Rooney conveys Peter’s condition by presenting the prose about him in a jarring staccato voice.  But the most fundamental tension of the novel is that between the bothers, which is rooted in their relationships with their recently deceased father.

For all the toil and trouble, the novel does finally revolve itself after Ivan meets and likes Naomi, and Peter meets, likes, and accepts Margaret, as if your rival’s approval of your life choice serves as sufficient acceptance. The ending takes on a Dickensian air. The family and assorted connections will all gather for a Christmas holiday. The last thoughts are given to Peter, the one who had furthest to go, still staccato, but trying: “Picture them all there together. To imagine also is life: the life that is only imagined. Clatter of saucepans, steam from the kettle. Even to think about it is to live. Hard cold wind blowing in from the sea, blowing his coat back, raising white hackles on the river. Nothing is fixed. She, the other. Ivan, the girlfriend. Christine, their father, from beyond the grave. It doesn’t always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.”