Intermezzo review: Sally Rooney ditches the style that made her ‘voice of a generation’

Sometimes in Intermezzo, as in Sally Rooney’s previous work, characters elide what they know or feel to be true with one of the following phrases: “Whatever”, “Hm”, “Mm”, “Cool”, “I don’t know”. In one such moment, a character tells another, “It’s none of my business.” What follows in reply is that moment of not speaking: “Neither of us believes that anymore, he doesn’t say. No such hygienic partition exists […] Conceptual collapse of one thing into another, all things into one. Instead he says meaninglessly: I don’t know.” In Wittgenstein’s introduction to his own Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a proposition can be found that rests gently beneath such moments, and retrospectively, beneath Rooney’s fiction overall. The problems of philosophy, of life, we are told, find their roots in the misuse of language. And so, he writes, “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”

What happens in those moments of silence? Given Rooney’s previous novels – Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You? – and Rooney herself have garnered the kind of celebrity status that induces in fans cultish hysteria at best, and enthusiastic takedowns at worst, it seems an odd question. But those devoted to her novels recognise its importance. Intermezzo is Rooney’s fourth book, and there are many things its characters are unable to say aloud. Ivan and Peter have recently lost their father. Both are inhibited by grief and self-loathing. Both are in age-gap relationships that present their own difficulties: Ivan, at 22, with 36-year-old Margaret, and Peter at 34 with 23-year-old Naomi. Neither sees eye to eye. Wittgenstein’s conviction in Tractatus that a word may mean different things to different people, and that it may be applied at cross purposes conspires against them. Hence, the gulf between the two can be summarised in the style their chapters are delivered: Ivan’s with a familiar, Roonian precision, and Peter’s in a style reminiscent of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Ivan is a chess player and data analyst, a rationalist, but most importantly a young man newly in love, discovering for the first time the full range of his feelings. Peter, meanwhile, is possessed of too many: a humanitarian lawyer, a prototypical eldest child – unmoored but desperate to pacify, still in love with Sylvia, his university sweetheart. 

The tragedy, of course, is that little truly separates the two. Though they only meet three times during the novel, the reader knows what they cannot: that each brother loves the other, but language fails them; that both are perfectly capable of loving those to whom the other is important – that they both privately desire and experience profound forms of love in their own lives. Now we see Ivan, conflicted between the newness of his grief and his romantic relationship, feeling only the “intense longing to hear and say the words [I love you] again”. Now Peter, wishing himself dead and wanting, “at the same time […] desperately to be loved.” This, perhaps, has been Rooney’s project in earnest all along. To make legible that noiseless, ordinary longing that can be found everywhere despite – or maybe because of – illness, and, crisis, and logic, and fear, and duty. To know that love exists while “[t]he demands of other people multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way of saying […] more and more of life.” Resisting that knowledge is the root of Connell’s struggles in Normal People; why Alice’s desire for seclusion in Beautiful World is a force for harm, rather than good. In all of Rooney’s books so far, characters believe themselves to be the singular recipients of such a feeling.

But “[o]ther people might experience [it] all the time,” Ivan thinks at one point. “It could all be very ordinary […] Or even if it’s rare, to have a few times in life and no more, still worth living for.” In previous novels, such an admission might have been couched as subtext in discursive emails, humour, or misunderstanding. Certainly, before Intermezzo, I had grown used to the uniformity of Rooney’s sentences, the affectlessness of which razed any false separations between the flow of capital and the freedom to be, the intricacy of systemic injustices and the ability to speak. But there is a change in her style now, even in Ivan’s chapters, which reflects a depth and purity of thought attained after three novels’ worth of introspection.

“These were solid sensible ideas,” reads one passage, “powerful enough for the surface of daily life, but not powerful enough for the hidden life of desire shared between two people.” How moving it is, then, to find that hidden sentiment laid bare. How beautiful to find characters who flock to one another because that is, simply, all they need to stay alive. When Margaret extends Ivan’s “intelligence, his thoughtfulness” inwards, to soothe her heart. When Ivan recognises, because of her, “a sense of blessing […] that he is himself.” When Peter asks Ivan, “When I was the one who needed help, where were […] you?” When Naomi asks Peter, “You think you can vanish into thin air and it won’t affect me?” And when Sylvia hears Peter say, “I’m sorry”, and tells him only, “Don’t be”, “[s]miling with her cheeks and throat pink.” 

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On finishing, I reflected: what would it be to hold a book with a soul? I felt I had. I felt changed, and utterly the same, the way it feels to read Larkin, or Tolstoy; felt, that for the time spent reading Intermezzo, I had gone more deeply into the world, reattuned to its networked thrum of pleasures, miseries, worries, and erotics that I might already have been aware of – but dully. Sublime literature will do this for you. Any reader who cares to revisit Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World sequentially will find them striving towards that goal, each book more confident than the last, slightly less guarded in its pursuit. 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. Not everyone has given her the grace a young woman might have needed to reach this point. But for those who have been patient enough to wait, the reward is transcendent.

‘Intermezzo’ is published by Faber on 24 September