Book Shelf: Intermezzo

“This is a character study. A slow unfurling of conflict and desire, connection and disconnection.”

Sally Rooney makes me want to read slowly. I took six days to read her newest novel, Intermezzo, making my way through it about 50 pages at a time because I wanted to savour each sentence. She has a remarkable ability to observe something that I’ve never noticed, or never managed to articulate, and distil it with a clarity and efficiency that seems totally contradictory to its power. She builds entire people, and complex relationships between them, out of these seemingly small and sparse sentences.

Intermezzo is primarily about two brothers, 32-year-old Peter and 22-year-old Ivan. Peter is a barrister. Ivan is a chess player. Things between them have always been tense, but are especially so following the death of their father.

Ivan meets Margaret, an arts worker 14 years his senior, when he visits her town to play in a chess exhibition match. Margaret has complicated feelings about her and Ivan being drawn to one another; she’s recently divorced, and aware of the likely social perception and her own perception of the age gap.

Peter is trying to untangle his feelings for two women: Sylvia, his childhood sweetheart who broke up with him after a car accident left her with chronic pain; and Naomi, a 23-year-old student who he’s supporting financially but can’t shake off easily. He loves them both.

The novel swaps between Ivan, Margaret, and Peter’s points of view, although it remains in the third person. Peter’s chapters are written in staccato sentences, small, sharp snips of things that play with grammar. It took me about 140 pages to really sink into these parts. At first, they felt jarring, although I could see their intended effect of creating distinction between Peter and Ivan’s personalities and interior lives, and to emphasise Peter’s poor mental state and his disconnection with his brother. Once they felt just as smooth to read as Ivan and Margaret’s more ‘polished’ chapters, I noticed just how much Rooney was able to squeeze out of scenes with this approach to form.

It’s hard to be sure it isn’t recency bias, but this might be her best yet. I cared about these characters. I thought of them when I wasn’t reading the book. I thought to myself at some point, about three-quarters of the way through: how would I describe the plot? I’d have a hard time doing so. Not much happens in the way of big plot points, and yet it miraculously never sags or drags. This is a character study. A slow unfurling of conflict and desire, connection and disconnection.

Rooney is a master of recording tiny interactions that speak volumes about how two people relate to each other, or don’t. Take this paragraph for instance, in one of Ivan’s chapters. Margaret has just called him for the first time since they met at the chess tournament:

“Carefully, quietly, he takes an inhaling breath and then breathes out again, slightly away from the phone, not wanting her to hear any loud breathing noises. Is it his turn to begin talking again now, or it's still her turn? Another second passes in silence. Maybe it is his turn already and he's coming across as rude and standoffish.”

You can feel the silence. The awkward anticipation. The consciously-controlled exhale. The pressure of performing the phone call well without appearing to perform. The gap that exists between what is thought and what is expressed. The gap between how you want to be perceived and how you could be/are perceived.

I love that Rooney makes me think about the minutiae of a first phone call with someone you like. I love that she created Ivan and Margaret, Peter and Sylvia and Naomi. I have loved these past six days, spent getting to read Intermezzo for the first time. I know it won’t be the last.

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Have you read Intermezzo yet? Would love to chat with you about it in the comments.

Until next time,

Britt