I devoured Sally Rooney’s latest, Intermezzo.

It’s the story of two very different brothers – Peter is a lawyer in his thirties, successful and seemingly self-assured. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player, and a loner. He has always seen himself as socially awkward – the antithesis of Peter.

How often in 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. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.

The story begins with the death of their father and in the months that follow, we see how Peter and Ivan experience bereavement quite differently. Peter self-medicates and struggles to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and carefree Naomi, a college student. Ivan tries to maintain his routine but unexpectedly meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from a difficult marriage, and their lives soon become intensely intertwined.

There are multiple themes in this story and while I ordinarily focus on grief (and there’s plenty to consider here), the thing that really stood out for me was how Rooney developed the the inner voice of the self-critic. Each character has a dual presentation – the reader understands how they face the world and also what their self-critic is telling them.

But a person’s outward appearance does not define the boundaries of their internal feelings, Ivan knows. Plain, unappealing people are by no means exempt from the experience of strong passions.

In less capable hands it would have been a hot mess – too busy or perhaps the multiple voices indistinguishable. But this is Rooney and each voice is distinct and, more importantly, we see how the characters change and respond over the course of the story with their inner voice either aligning to what’s happening around them or the opposite, and where that happens, the pain endures.

As always, Rooney captures so much with an economy of words. I marked dozens of sentences, such as –

Is this how it feels, he thinks, to get what you want? To desire, and at the same time to have, still desiring, but fulfilled.

What if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?

Normal People remains my favourite of Rooney’s novels but Intermezzo is a close second.

4/5

Ivan has ordered French onion soup. They both begin eating, and the soup is so hot and rich and flavourful that Ivan feels his mouth watering even as he eats, remembering how hungry he is, the two plain slices of white bread he ate for lunch, his face growing damp now in the steam rising appetisingly from the soup bowl.