Intermezzo is a wish-fulfillment romance

An earworm from the time of Covid: the sound of Connell and Marianne having breathless sex, bedsprings squeaking. I’m talking not about 2020’s hit TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling second novel, Normal People but about the relentless piss-take featured on BBC Radio 4’s Dead Ringers. After every few skits the show would cut to an audio clip of the two undergraduates going hard at it. The joke was in the repetition — an exaggeration of the extraordinary density of earnest sex scenes in Rooney’s writing. It was crude, cruel and very funny.

There is a wider than usual gulf between the writer Rooney wants to be and the writer she actually is

It’s all too easy to mock this serious-minded writer who dazzled the book world, aged just twenty-six, with her single comic novel, 2017’s Conversations with Friends. Three novels later, that deliciously deadpan debut is starting to look like an outlier. 2018’s Normal People, 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You and now Intermezzo are sober explorations of anxious young people struggling through their twenties and thirties. Certain elements recur. Dublin is a key location, and at least some of the main characters are hyper-intelligent undergraduates or graduates of Trinity College. Rooney loves an even number and a bit of symmetry. Normal People focuses on a single couple, but all the rest take four main characters and complicate and contrast the various pairings. Often there is some kind of self-harm and an obscurely unpleasant family history. And there is always plenty of sex.

Strictly speaking, there are five main characters in Intermezzo, but it’s still a case of compare and contrast. Ivan and Peter Koubek are brothers — Ivan a chess genius in his early twenties, Peter a successful lawyer in his early thirties. Their father has just died after five years of cancer treatment. Ivan is aware of his grief; Peter less so, because he ineffectively numbs his feelings with drugs.

At an exhibition chess game in the rural town of Kildare, Ivan meets thirty-six-year-old Margaret, who works in the arts center that hosts the game. They fall in love and begin an affair, kept secret in part because of Margaret’s fears about her alcoholic ex-husband. Meanwhile, Peter is sleeping with Naomi, a student in her early twenties. The two brothers fall out when Ivan tells Peter about Margaret and Peter makes a snap judgment about the age gap. Ivan doesn’t know about Naomi, so is unaware of the extent of his brother’s hypocrisy.

Peter’s old girlfriend, a university lecturer called Sylvia, is still in the picture, too: they are best friends from the debating circuit at Trinity College, and each other’s passionate first love. (Strong shades of Marianne and Connell here.) Their relationship ended when Sylvia was badly injured in a road traffic accident, the details of which are unclear. We know that she has been left with “chronic refractory pain” and that she is unable to have penetrative sex because it hurts. For reasons relating to this, she has decided that she and Peter can never be together, even though they seem to be soulmates. Sylvia knows that Peter is sleeping with Naomi, but Naomi doesn’t know that Peter is withholding himself emotionally because he’s still in love with Sylvia, dependent on “the deep replenishing reservoir of her presence.”

So what is there to laugh at in all this? Quite a lot, really — which presents a problem for the reviewer. Part of my job is to entertain you, and Intermezzo offers ample opportunity for parody. It’s tempting, for example, to question Rooney’s prose. The novel is focalized for three of the characters — Ivan, Margaret and Peter. Ivan’s perspective is the best feature; it’s an unexpected treat to see Rooney sympathetically inhabiting the mind of a nerdy young man who was recently a teenager with incel-ish views. For Peter’s narration, Rooney seems to have tapped the microphone that James Joyce set in Leopold Bloom’s head in Ulysses. The two characters share a distinctive staccato thought pattern: fragmented sentences designed to capture a jinking, curious mind. Except Peter’s mind is much less curious and interesting than Bloom’s. So the shorthand doesn’t feel like a fruitful compression; it just slows the reader down. “Next minute might die. Happens every day to someone.”

Margaret’s sections are fairly straightforward, but all three modes share a stylistic tic: the extreme scrambling of syntax to impart… well, what exactly? Literary beauty? Here’s a quick primer in Roonish. Don’t, whatever you do, start with the subject. Don’t say the city feels empty, but: “Empty the city feels.” Not they had given her tea, but: “Tea they had given her.” Not his eyes were sore and he felt hot, but: “Sore his eyes and hot he felt.” If at all possible, avoid verbs: “Deafening the clamor of applause.” And don’t be afraid to just throw the words up in the air and see what order they land in: “Talk to someone he would nearly like to.”

Then there is the insistent repetition of life itself, which is the book’s clangorous central message. Peter finds himself driven by “the will to survive, appetite for life itself.” Ivan, falling in love, finds that “life itself seems to glow all around him.” Luckily Margaret agrees: “[She] feels that she can perceive the miraculous beauty of life itself.”

Sylvia is the novel’s most preposterous character — a Victorian angel in unintentionally comic contrast to sexy, brash Naomi. “All quiet and stillness gathered at the point of her merciful touch.” Her storyline with Peter relies on occlusion and misunderstanding. As in Normal People, a single frank conversation would save pages of angst. For years, Sylvia and Peter have implausibly postponed discussing their old relationship, allowing Peter to work himself into a state of high melodrama. “On the one hand, the love of his life, high principle of his conscience… On the other, his captive, his tormentor…” His thoughts are unconvincingly suicidal for much of the novel’s second half.

All of this takes place in picturesque settings evoking the austere beauty of the Toast catalog: think natural fibers and lots of poetic rain. Food is handled with particular reverence: “Soft sizzle of the dipped bread on the pan. Whitish foam of frying butter.”

The trouble is, I don’t actually want to laugh at Rooney. To continue to list Intermezzo’s silly bits would be to belie the experience of reading it. This is a novel I always wanted to return to, a novel that worked on me like a self-help book and left me feeling I might have a stab at being a better person, at practicing a spot of kindness and gratitude. It’s a romantic novel, a motivational, wish-fulfillment novel. The emotive ending provides a level of gratification that borders on the downright cheesy. In short, Intermezzo feels like a guilty pleasure.

The emotive ending provides a level of gratification that borders on the downright cheesy

There is a wider than usual gulf between the writer Rooney wants to be and the writer she actually is. She identifies with nineteenth-century realism, yet practices a softcore literary idealism. This is how the audience at Clogherkeen Arts Center experience a young pianist’s rendition of the Goldberg Variations: “The tense thrilled hush of listeners gathered together around the sound: sharing in silence this one brief consciousness.” Music can do this — it can bind in this way. But so completely? At a classical music concert, the realist’s job is surely also to notice the wandering minds, the fidgets, the clock-watchers. Intermezzo is written in a harmonious minor third, with none of the dissonance that “life itself” actually involves. 

Rooney is marketed as an intellectual, and a serious literary novelist, and her novels display the trappings of literary seriousness. There are no speech marks. The prose approximates the fragmentations of modernism. Her characters are precociously clever, although here we mostly experience their cleverness in slightly bogus summary: “Literature in the Regency period they talked about. Significance of the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon, the man. Toussaint Louverture. Bolivar, Garibaldi…” In fact, Rooney writes simple, heart-warming moral tales full of sex. She has yet to tackle the complex mundanity of a long-term relationship. All of her narratives depict nascent romances or on-off relationships plagued by misunderstanding. If you approach her work expecting high literature, you are bound to be disappointed, even scornful. But if you put on the kettle and cozy up for an old-fashioned love story, then you might just find yourself having a good time.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.