As someone who when asked, “What’s your all-time favorite book?” responds with, “Probably Normal People by Sally Rooney,” I’ve been chasing the high of that book ever since I first read it. No one in history has probably ever described a Sally Rooney reading experience in that way, but for me it checked all of the boxes I look for in a novel. The painful yet beautiful moments that can exist between just two people, like taking a microscope to a random spot on a map and simply observing the mundanity of it, is what has always drawn me to Rooney’s writing style. She has greatly honed her craft in her most recent release, Intermezzo, and has perfected the art of character study. My reader heart that misses Marriane and Connell so much has happily found solace in the stories of brothers Peter and Ivan, despite how confronting some of their moments could be.
At its core, Intermezzo is a story about two brothers who have just lost their father, and are navigating a generational gap between themselves and the unconventional relationships they find themselves in. Grief is the quiet catalyst of their current lives, as well as in the narrative for the reader, but it’s gorgeously subtle. Peter, the older brother, was not even particularly close with their deceased father, but we watch as he grapples with the man and paternal figure he wants to be for Ivan in his absence. Ivan, on the other hand, is a savant chess player fresh out of university who lived full-time with their father prior to his death, and strongly dislikes the person his brother has turned out to be. Through them both, we learn that grief is not always an ever-present and consistent feeling. It can sit in the background and observe; make you question who you have truly turned out to be, like for Peter, or it may agonize you and make you wonder if the only person who truly understood you is now gone, like for Ivan.
In Intermezzo, Rooney has mastered the art of a character’s voice, as both Peter and Ivan possess starkly different perspectives and narration styles, to the point where you know who is currently narrating within the first sentence of a chapter. Peter feels hurried and manic, and I felt the closest to him compared to every other character, because we know he is masking such dark demons from the people in his life. Ivan, on the other hand, sees the world analytically and in detail, signaling to us why others may misunderstand him, as he’s definitely not a conventional thinker.
This is another theme that Rooney centers with such care: love in unconventional relationships and how we grapple with what society deems to be unfit, especially when it falls directly in our laps. Throughout the course of the novel, Peter flip-flops between two women — Sylvia, the long-term love of his life-turned-“friend” after an accident leaves her with chronic pain, and Naomi, an unhoused college student many years his junior. Meanwhile, Ivan begins a romantic relationship with Margaret, a kind artistic woman who is over 10 years his senior. Peter’s actions in juggling both women are selfish and seem manipulative at first, but the narrative style also allows us to empathize for what he truly is at his core: a man desperate for connection amidst his grief, and someone who is struggling with the weight of his new reality. I do wish we had more time with the resolution of Peter’s arc in the last couple chapters, as moments did feel rushed and quickly resolved once the end was near. Despite that, I was still struck by the way Rooney handled their relationship dynamics with such care and understanding. We are often so quick to judge the lives of others when it perplexes us, but until we’re in that position ourselves, it’s simply unfair and unproductive to do so.
The “uncommon” is really not uncommon at all; it’s just another experience among the millions surrounding us, but is unbelievably meaningful just the same. As Rooney writes it from the perspective of Margaret, “This is life, the experience, this is all there has ever been. To force this moment into contact with her ordinary existence only seems to reveal how constricting, how misshapen her ideas of life have been before.”