I AM NOT SAYING that I conjured a new Sally Rooney novel, but last year, I posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, “I know she just published a book, but like . . . when is Sal Roones coming back. I need her,” and a few months later, it was announced that she would be returning with her fourth novel, Intermezzo. Rooney Toons, myself among them, were up huge. There was nothing to do except wait. And now the wait is over.

Intermezzo concerns itself with the Koubek brothers, Peter and Ivan, who find themselves in the muddle of grief after their father’s recent death. Peter, early thirties, is a well-regarded lawyer, and Ivan, twenty-two, is a chess journeyman who used to be something of a prodigy. They aren’t close and haven’t been for some time. Peter is patronizing in the way older brothers can be, and Ivan has the reactionary arrogance of the younger brother who abhors being condescended to by someone older but less intelligent. Peter gives the eulogy at the funeral in Kildare, which we later discover really irritates Ivan, who has always felt that Peter disliked their father and didn’t know him very well. After the funeral, the brothers decamp to Dublin and return to their separate lives, a branching that gives the novel its structural gambit and what might be called its plot.

In Dublin, Peter is sleeping with two women—rather, he is sleeping with Naomi, in her very early twenties, while pining for his first and true love, Sylvia, a literature professor he still sees regularly. Peter quietly supports Naomi with cash that she supplements by selling feet pics and the like online to men that Peter, bless him, alternately pities and feels threatened by. Pointing out the transactional nature of their relationship feels almost silly, and the silliness of the gesture is something Peter turns over in the novel time and again—why else would she be with him? In their relationship, money is both erotic and practical, and while you couldn’t call it FinDom or #Gen exactly, there is an aspect of role-play at work in their dynamic, keeper and kept, but, like, casual.

The transactional element of Peter’s relationship with Sylvia is murkier and also more interesting. They used to be a couple until Sylvia had a horrifying accident that left her in a state of constant pain. They are still in each other’s lives in an important way (Sylvia was the only friend Peter invited to his father’s funeral), and while Peter is game to rekindle their physical relationship, Sylvia resists the very idea. This leaves them at a painful impasse because neither Sylvia nor Peter has been able to let go, which might be best for both of them. But then, I imagine that the pain of knowing they’ll never be those people again for whom love and sex came without the excruciating agony pays for the pleasure of seeing one another and allowing themselves to remember, even to some limited extent, the goodness of the past.

The drama of Peter’s sections of the novel has to do with his wavering between these two women, who are not unknown to each other. Sylvia often asks about Naomi, and Naomi about Sylvia. Naomi’s roommates in their illegal squat seem to view Peter with amusement, yes, but also appear to acknowledge that there is some kind of relationship between the two of them. He cannot allow himself to be with Naomi because he knows (or perhaps fears is more accurate, because he doesn’t know) he won’t love her as much as he loves Sylvia. Why? Because he views her as inappropriate for him—age, class, social position, generational mindset, attitudes toward drug use, recreational and otherwise—and you can see the way he wields his financial support of Naomi to delegitimize the relationship and punish himself. But likewise, he can’t be with Sylvia because, well, for one thing, she refuses to be with him because of her pain, and she fears he will make his life into a monument of sacrifice, and for another thing, he isn’t totally sure he can be in a potentially sexless relationship, though he really wants to believe that he can. Even when the two women basically force him to actively and seriously consider the idea of an open relationship—Peter’s great moral dilemma in this novel is whether it’s selfish to love two women and to fuck them both—he vacillates and angsts passively by thinking in quotations and references to literature and theology. Intermezzo is Rooney’s most allusive and ambiently theological novel to date, and never more so than when we watch Peter work his way through his own personal hell: being wanted by two women, but in kind of confusing ways. In some aspects, this makes Peter a classic Rooney character: not quite able to see himself, informed on so much about philosophy and art and even the material and spiritual constraints of his life, but somehow underinformed about his own core damage.

Rooney has always been interested in the delusions of self-effacement. In Conversations with Friends, Frances tells us again and again that she can’t see her own face and doesn’t really understand how others view her, a condition on which she is ambivalent. You see it too with Connell in Normal People, when he goes to a counselor toward the end of the novel because he’s been spiraling and depressed but doesn’t yet know he’s depressed, and when he finally unspools the story of a friend who recently killed himself, it’s only then that he becomes aware of the thing at the heart of his issue, that he feels he’s slipped out of life and has no context and no one to understand him. Beautiful World, Where Are You has Eileen, who seems constitutionally unable to let herself be happy, and she goes around wrecking every relationship, using her intellect to rationalize and justify her behavior, until she finally fesses up to not really believing she deserves happiness.

In Rooney’s novels, these dark spots in self-perception most often coincide with pain, physical and psychic. Connell has panic attacks that he does not at first recognize as such. The other protagonist of Normal People, Marianne,is abused by her brother, and later she seeks out violent sex from her lovers, though only posits a potential connection between the two toward the end of the novel. Frances suffers from a mysterious pain that is later diagnosed as endometriosis, while Nick, the married man with whom she is carrying on an affair, suffers from profound depression and later gets a very bad case of pneumonia. Alice, one of the two narrators of Beautiful World, Where Are You, suffers from a nervous breakdown before the start of the novel, and at the end of the book, in a coda of sorts, she reveals that she’s suffering from chronic pain, an echo of what we later come to recognize as Sylvia’s plight.

Pain runs like a silver thread through all of Rooney’s work, at times literalizing a spiritual theme, and at other times functioning as a material constraint that sharpens a character’s sense of their condition. The issue with psychic pain is that it has a tendency, when done poorly, to feel too much like a theme, a little too literary, and we have in Intermezzo the rather abstract and elaborate moral construction that Peter has made for himself regarding the two women juxtaposed with Sylvia’s literal, visceral pain, which draws out some of Rooney’s best writing in the book.

When Peter, whose chief purpose in the novel seems to be as witness to Sylvia’s suffering, reflects on her condition, “Christ survived his death too,” that line sublimates Sylvia into the platonic ideal of a Rooney character: someone beautiful, brilliant, and desired, but unable to reciprocate that desire because of a state of simmering, unending pain whose bright spikes feel both physical and spiritual. Because he cannot be with Sylvia, Peter sleeps with Naomi, and in this way, we kind of re-enter Conversations with Friends,but from the perspective of the depressed guy with the prior romantic attachment.

You can actually understand why Conversations with Friends would never have worked from Nick’s perspective when you read Intermezzo, because Peter’s basic dramatic issue is that a hot young woman loves him and a beautiful woman he loves also loves him, and he cannot be with one without making the other a little sad. Even when the women gang up on him and basically demand that he be in an open relationship with them, he demurely whines about how that isn’t how life is supposed to go. Women throw themselves into this man’s emotional blast radius, and he’s just so sad about it, but not sad enough to actually change how he treats them or himself—the misery is somehow the point, unhappiness its reluctant reality principle. This is interesting to a point, but at length (the length of a novel, for example), it all starts to feel rather too…written.

While Peter is doing his best Love Island Hamlet in Dublin, Ivan goes to give a chess demonstration in a small town and meets Margaret, who is about fourteen years his senior and serves as the program director and chauffeur for the local arts center. There’s a bit of banter, and one thing leads to another, and they have sex. What follows is one of the very best love stories I have ever read in literary fiction as we watch these two people, very different in age and life and experience, fall in love. Rooney is as good as ever on the lightning quick pulse of desire and the odd but totally natural way two strangers fall into bed together and the resulting intimacy that arises therefrom. In the chapters that concern Ivan and Margaret, there is another branch in the narration, sometimes following Margaret and sometimes following Ivan as they text and talk and go through the busy ongoingness of daily life.

We discover that Margaret is separated from an alcoholic husband who still finds ways to insinuate himself into her life. He shows up at her job at the arts center, demanding to see her, sometimes drunk, always loud and imposing. Margaret’s family thinks that she’s abandoned a good man just because he’s a little troubled. Then she meets this twenty-two-year-old chess guy and finds, shockingly, that she really likes him! But she can’t let anyone know about it because word would almost certainly get back to her mother and sister and to her estranged husband, and not only that—it would draw a great deal of judgment from everyone in her town. Margaret feels hemmed in just at the moment she’s found a little shard of light, another chance at potential happiness. Her fears cause her to question what she’s doing with this young man, fresh from grief himself.

For Ivan’s part, he’s all about Margaret. He thinks she’s sexy and interesting and very kind. He doesn’t feel judged by her in the way he’s often felt judged by neurotypical people. It suddenly doesn’t feel like a problem that he’s not got experience and that he’s not good with people. Reading about Ivan and Margaret being nice to each other, trying to understand each other, talking through their differences in belief and faith made me feel like I was reading about real people—adults, even. They can’t be seen out in public because some people still care about that sort of thing. To some people, you don’t just divorce your shit husband and then go to the farmers market with your new boyfriend. For other people, relation is complicated, painful, sticky, enduring.

**Arthur Dove, *The Brothers*, 1942,** tempera and wax emulsion on canvas, 20 × 28″. Gift of Robert L. B. Tobin through the Friends of the McNay © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.

THE FORMAL GAMBIT of Rooney’s previous book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, was an intensely cinematized narration that at its most successful caused the internal motivations and emotional states of her characters to shine out like intense blue light from glaciers. With Intermezzo, Rooney has performed the reciprocal operation, and the novel rises and falls on the beat of consciousness, like a subtly remixed modernist patter, part Susan Taubes, part Virginia Woolf, all millennial deadpan. As with the objective narration of Beautiful World, this new style sometimes attains a gorgeous, rhythmic effect that blurs emotion, physicality, and interiority: “The sky a glass bowl struck and resounding. The old life, here. Carrying on without him always. Young people with books in their arms, laughing. First taste from the world’s full cup.” Such a passage echoes Mrs. Dalloway, in which Woolf describes the sound of Big Ben: “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” There are many such moments of beauty in Intermezzo, which I came to refer to as “Rooney in Her Modernist Drag,” as when Ivan recalls a day with Margaret:

. . . he finds himself thinking again about the weekend, when he and Margaret were swimming in the sea together, and everything was beautiful. The green water, the grey-white daylight, coarse sand, vast and silent cliffs, all complete and perfect in themselves. In nature, he thinks, there is no such thing as ugliness. It’s like he tried to tell Margaret in the car, beauty belongs to God, and ugliness to human beings, although he couldn’t explain himself very well.

What makes the passage work is that little intrusion of fragmentary sense memory, the way it instantiates thought without the apparatus of narration, dropping the use of “he thought” or “he remembered,” and instead dipping into pure memory itself, impressionistic and fleeting. Structurally, it bears an uncanny resemblance to a moment in To the Lighthouse,when Mrs. Ramsay comes to feel that her life has been sufficient to her happiness:

With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

In both instances, the content of memory overflows the bounds of narration, as if the character is totally consumed not by the act of remembering but by the memory itself as associations rapidly gain momentum and force, causing the entire passage to vibrate until epiphany flashes out: Beauty belongs to God and It is enough! It is enough! Such moments of grace and brilliance show a writer coming into a rich new idiom. Rooney Toons have never had it so good!

However, just as in Beautiful World,such intense stylization can be tiring, and you start to long for the return of sentences with subjects and verbs. I wish Intermezzo were freer or less bound by its structural preoccupations. Which is to say that, yes, while enjoyable, there is something of a student’s exercise about the novel.

Sometimes people with graduate degrees in creative writing are accused of writing technically proficient but boring prose, or stories that function well but attain nothing lifelike. People without graduate degrees in creative writing are often held up as some sort of shaggy band of true inheritors of the literary tradition. Brilliant experimentalists. Risk-takers and politically engaged. There are writers—Sally Rooney perhaps chief among them—about whom it is said with a gleeful delirium, “They don’t have an MFA!” In response, I’ve started to think, after having read a handful of novels by people like this, “Yeah, you can tell.” This struck me as especially true in Rooney’s case as I reread all of her novels alongside Intermezzo. Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You all demonstrate a writer of virtuosic gifts but minor technical proficiency.

For example, the main narration of Intermezzo is primarily in the present tense. There are two main ways of demonstrating action in present tense: simple present (he walks) and present progressive (he is walking). These are not interchangeable, and when you substitute “he is walking” for “he walks,” you create a sense of distance and sluggishness. “He walks” is directly on the line of action. “He is walking” implies that the main focus is elsewhere, still to come. It’s a kind of anticipatory, on-the-balls-of-your-feet, falling-forward sensation.

It’s always bothered me that Rooney deploys present progressive when she should deploy simple present. This is especially the case in Intermezzo. Just popping the book open randomly, you find “she is looking down at the soles of her feet, crossed on the mattress” and “Ivan is standing on his own in the corner, while the men from the chess club move chairs and tables around.”

The present progressive, those “-ing” verbs, are anesthetizing because they sap energy from the line of action.

That the novels work at all is a testament to Rooney’s other talents: dialogue that is natural and musical, swift characterization, absolutely genius comic timing, and a wonderful hand at description, when she lets herself indulge. Those are no small things. Writers should consider themselves lucky to have one of those talents, let alone a combination of gifts that allows them to render, in the span of one text exchange, the whole texture of modern relationships.

Yet I don’t think the books hold up structurally. There’s something rickety about the last third of Conversations with Friends, in which the book suffers from what my writing teacher used to call “an outbreak of plot.” All of the books show a preponderance of rote non-writing, those inane bits of physical and visual data that betray an inattention to the mechanics of point of view. From a technique perspective, the novels feel like drafts, filled with the sorts of tics, bad habits, and dead prose that hopefully get ironed out by an editor or, dare I say, a workshop.

Rooney has a reputation for her sex writing—one that she gently satirizes in Beautiful World, Where Are You when she makes Alice a writer also known for her sex writing—and that reputation is mostly earned. She writes with a smooth, dry hand and is attuned to all the little bits of humor and subtle humiliation shading into delight and pleasure that sex entails. Taken as a whole, though, her sex scenes organize around a very narrow band of themes. The women always want to be told that they’re good girls, that they’re behaving so well, so good for daddy. The men want to feel strong, and are apologetic about coming fast because she’s so wet, so good, and he’s so turned on when he gets to call her a good girl. The men coming fast feels like a power inversion, a way of demonstrating that the men are not invulnerable during sex. For the women, the pleasure seems to derive not just from penetration or clitoral stimulation, but from handing over authority to the men, playing out a variety of trad fantasy. What the women want is not exactly annihilation—not even Marianne at her most masochistic craves sexual annihilation—but a kind of submission for which annihilation is the ultimate symbol. What is more submissive than giving oneself over to someone who could, quite literally, snap your neck? That isn’t about wanting to die. The death is purely symbolic. For the men, the loss of control is less subtle—they flush, they get worked up when the women suck on their fingers, or look at them with big, wet eyes. Again, it’s that trad thing. And I suppose the subtext here is that because these are all educated men and women, raised on feminism and female prime ministers, bored with all that bourgeois patriarchy shit, this subtle reversion to trad sexual fantasy is subversive.

I am not immune. I too harbor fantasies about being told I’m a good boy by a hot man who is bigger than me and stronger than me while he forces-but-doesn’t-force me to experience sensations I can’t control. I mean, that’s hot. I can see the thrill in abandoning intellect and good liberatory politics for the sweet release of degradation. In a world that demands you be a top, there is something powerful, pleasurable, about being a bottom.

Yet I was struck by how consistently this formulation arises in Rooney’s work—both couples in Beautiful World, Where Are You, Frances and Nick in Conversations with Friends, Marianne and her sexual partners in Normal People. What felt freshest and most urgent in those earlier novels was that Rooney wrote things that typically people only say during sex and then rapidly try to forget they said the minute the body fluids cool. In this way, she gave voice to something present in a great many people’s lives, but which they had felt ashamed of expressing or unable to express. She was actually writing the shit people say and do during everyday sex! Rooney treats everyday sex as though it were a narrative or dramatic happening, singled out for special attention. You can see the effect that might have on a reading public starved for good sex writing. She caught the sexual mundane up in language private but totally accessible.

However, when you take in Rooney’s entire body of work, the sex does feel, well, repetitive. Her great skill at conveying the things people really say and do during sex can at times turn her oeuvre into one long consent fantasy. Does this feel good? Can I take this off you? Can I touch you here? Do you want me to touch there? Rooney understands—perhaps instinctively—what makes her sex writing so special, so good, so natural, but this is paradoxically what renders it kind of inert after a while. Because there is nothing messy in it. The characters talk too much, and after a while, the effect is to be overwhelmed by a constantly whispering tide of consent asked and consent given, a little heat, a little friction, and then lying pleasantly in each other’s arms trading banter and wit, sometimes saying just the wrong thing and ruining it all. I started to long for something a little rougher around the edges or for a little more risk, something outré, perhaps, or even, frankly, gay.

It isn’t fair to put that on Rooney. After all, reading four of her novels in short succession is kind of an edge-case situation, and no writer should be penalized for extreme reader behavior.

I SPENT A LOT OF THE SUMMER reading European, British, and Irish novels by contemporary authors, some debuts, some established, but it was only when I read a recent American novel that I realized that the key difference between the Euro-British-Irish novel and the novel of the United States at just this moment is that characters in novels by American writers don’t have any friends. I don’t know how I didn’t notice it before. One of the significant drivers of plot and theme in Rooney’s work—like that of her European contemporaries—is hanging out and all that it entails. Her characters exist in large networks of friendships, neighbors, families, family friends, coworkers, old lovers, roommates, and more. Consider those moments in Intermezzo when Margaret is afraid to be seen with Ivan out in public because what if someone sees! I was struck by a couple things in this: one, that she is recognizable in her community, and two, that there could be social and personal consequences for getting spotted with your too-young boyfriend. I can’t imagine it happening in a contemporary American novel, not even one set in a small town.

Intermezzo is so sharp and right about the complications and dramas that make up life in small places, where people know their neighbors and are part of their communities, particularly lives that are not shaped by the vector of wanting out or moving to a big city. Margaret is a grown woman. She likes her job. She likes being close to people she’s known her whole life. She doesn’t want to leave. That’s what makes the issue with her husband so painful. If she wanted to just get up and leave—if there were such a place that would dissolve all of her problems—yes, she could do that. But Rooney does the smart thing. She attends to those who stay and for whom leaving is not a solution or even a consideration.

Not only this, but Rooney’s characters are constantly texting and emailing and chatting on the phone, running into so-and-so from down the way, talking about people and things that never show up on the page directly but that conjure a whole world at great depth. This total social surface is breathtaking in part because it indicts the social vacuum in which many American novels occur. Our characters and, by extension, our novels are so vastly lonely. No one is hanging out! No one is really engaging in friendship. The American literary conception of friendship is as a ranked list of class signifiers that tell us the author is an astute and funny observer of micro-niche mores among the media class, but do these works actually conjure real friendship? It’s bleak out here!

I recently undertook to read the three books in Knausgaard’s Morning Star series that have been translated into English, and there, again, you find a whole world. An entire cast of characters, dozens of names, who together give a sense that what is said and done out in the world by the protagonist has a long tail and a history. Reading Rooney, you get that same feeling. It’s something I miss in American literature. Friends! Imagine such a thing!

ON BALANCE, I enjoyed Intermezzo, though I think it would have been stronger without Peter’s sections, which seemed after a while to exist solely to give Rooney an opportunity to smuggle some philosophy and literature into the book. It makes sense. Ivan’s interiority isn’t particularly literary, and he’s got to think hard to get to some understanding of the quick and easy social cues that most people take for granted. Ivan’s narration is intelligent, sensitive, funny, and erudite in its own odd way. But Peter’s mind is a dizzying, twitchy place to be. Though we are told often that Peter is the “normal one” who understands socializing and is very popular, it’s his narration that is the most fractured and hardest to make sense of. Impressive for two pages or even fifteen pages, but for it to comprise half a book? Exhausting.

One might be tempted to justify Peter’s presence in the novel by gesturing to Levin in Anna Karenina, and the chapters of scything and meditations on land management, but I disagree. Levin’s direct analogue in Intermezzo is in fact Ivan. Peter is more an anxious retread of Nickfrom Conversations with Friends but given the interiority of Septimus Smith from Mrs. Dalloway. His sections are dull after a while, his company extremely wearying. He comes to some truly beautiful and arresting language around theology and the common goodness of life. But man, you gotta work for it, and you long to part with him.

Fathers are always rather complicated in Rooney’s novels. In Normal People, Marianne’s father is dead, and Connell’s father is a question mark. In Conversations with Friends, Frances’s father is not well and he comes unglued over the course of the book. The parents of Beautiful World, Where Are You exist insomuch as they provide the characters with siblings. The dead father in this novel, like Frances’s father, is described as being incredibly delicate and nervy. In that sense, Peter takes after his father, and you get the sense that he’s the one who’s had to learn how to mask some rather difficult mental weather. I guess I just found it a slog to care about him, and the book strained so hard in his sections, throwing everything at me: references to literature, art, movies, the Bible, Christ! None of it stuck. I didn’t care about him and Sylvia. I didn’t care about him and his child bride. I didn’t care about his grief, even, though I did enjoy the Hamlet references.

That’s kind of a bummer. It’s half a good book, Margaret and Ivan. But it’s half a tedious novel made from the partially rearranged remnants of other Rooney outings. There’s even a moment when they decamp from Dublin to the dead father’s house in Kildare! She loves doing that! One is very much aware of the clicking of the wheels when reading this novel. Enjoyable. Pleasurable. But it is not a seamless experience. I know it’s rather boring of me to say so, but I do wish the book had more polish, and that she had concealed her work a little more.

But as we’ve learned, you don’t come to Sally Rooney for technical perfection. Rooney Toons come for the feelings, and this book has plenty.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life (2020) and the story collection The Late Americans (2023, both Riverhead Books).

Video

_Bookforum_’s “The Night we Called it a Day” Valentine’s Day Reading at the New Museum, 2014