A Review of Sally Rooney's 'Intermezzo'

Brotherhood, love and sex: overall, I reccomend

“There is more to life than great chess. Okay, great chess is still a part of life, and it can be a very big part, very intense, satisfying, and pleasant to dwell on in the mind’s eye: but nonetheless, life contains many things. Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live.”

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Sally Rooney released her latest novel ‘Intermezzo’ in September 2024. The novel’s title is the Italian name for a chess maneuver: the “in-between move,” in which a player does not make the expected move. Rather, she puts an immediate threat on the board her opponent must respond to — then performs the expected move. Perhaps as a metaphor for the text, the once-prodigal 22-year-old Ivan Koubek plays the intermezzo in life when he begins a romantic relationship with Margaret following his father’s death. At 36 years old, she is recently divorced and 14 years his senior. Ivan’s strained relationship with his older brother Peter suffers when Ivan tells him about her. Peter is a successful lawyer and self-medicating with Xanax mess, who dates two women at once: Noami, an Only Fans-model college student and Sylvia, his first love he cannot let go — a professor unable to have sex due to chronic pain. Yes, the women know about each other. No, Peter should not be commenting on other people’s love lives in his state.

Ivan lived in Peter’s fraternal shadow. Peter lived in Ivan’s cerebral one. With each man’s psyche impacted by the loss of their father, the novel’s 448 pages are a long road to the expected move: brotherhood prevailed. ‘Intermezzo’ is a web of chess moves, love moves and interpersonal nuance ensconced in Rooney’s mundane-beautiful prose. The novel carries her similar trappings, though lacking an epic, pained love story that rises to the ones Rooney devoted ‘Normal People’ and ‘Conversations with Friends’ to. There is college, Dublin, glamorous intellect and the inextricable pull between sets of people despite means that may pull them apart — age gaps, marriages, outside ridicule. Also, less chess than I expected.

The story is told through three characters’ free indirect discourse: Peter’s, Ivan’s and Margaret’s. It opens with Peter’s perspective, which Rooney distinguishes from the others with a relentless, stream-of-consciousness style that oscillates from prosaic to poetic. She captures the fragmented nature of consciousness amidst grief, and there are nuggets of gold scattered through his stream of thoughts for readers to dredge through the muck of Peter’s mind. As he walks down the street with Sylvia, we get a line of Robert Hayden’s poetry, memories with his father, desires he rarely voices. He’s tired, too warm. He’s thinking of Ivan, of chess, of women in general and old college friends. Outside his rapid internal churning, Peter asks Sylvia to stay the night and that is all he says. While I applaud Rooney for exploring a non-traditional, run-on style and maintaining cohesion despite of it, Peter’s perspective of well-written but grating prose could get tiresome. There are only so many short sentences without proper nouns I can take, which meant a smoother experience reading Ivan and Margaret’s chapters. Theirs felt like emerging from underwater and gasping for air after reading Peter’s plethora of short sentences without proper nouns.

When Rooney introduces Ivan, he is a chess genius struggling with the price of prodigy. The 22-year-old feels he has excelled in an intellectual pursuit at the expense of social skills. We learn later in the novel that he flirted with quasi-incel, ‘Ben Shapiro Eviscerates Woke Feminist’ views in his adolescence. This tidbit of character background helps flesh out Ivan’s schism with his older brother, which we can try to understand from the contours each brother feeds to us via flawed narrations. Peter, in college and past the pangs of puberty, felt revolted by the sexist leanings of his lonely brother.

Ivan stresses basic human interaction and his passion for chess is dimming in the haze of grief over his father. His inner world brightens when he meets Margaret, who works for the venue hosting a chess tournament Ivan plays in. Love makes the world make sense to him. After he tells Margaret he loves her and she says it back, the world is suddenly simple. He sees the goodness in others and the value in being good.

The same could be said about Margaret, who feels emancipated by her tryst with the younger chess player. In love, she feels less burdened by the monotony she has reached in her 30s and her prior failed marriage. Is this what love does — turn the saturation up on life? Despite her feelings, she spends most of the novel worrying about what others will say about her dating braces-wearing Ivan. It is hard to fault her for this — how could she not?

Rooney’s decision to include Margaret’s perspective but not Sylvia’s or Naomi’s resulted in Ivan and Margaret’s relationship feeling more fleshed out. However, it caused my relationship with Sylvia and Naomi to suffer. Both women, who Rooney takes the time to describe as smart, remain at a distance as objects of Peter’s desire. Why did Rooney provide a window into Margaret’s consciousness, but not one for Sylvia’s or Naomi’s? We see them through the limited view of Peter’s feelings for them — through his torn, languished heart. Other reviewers have complained that Ivan’s perspective felt undercut by Margaret’s, resulting in him feeling like the less developed brother, character-wise. I did not mind because Ivan and Margaret felt like the beating heart of the novel. Their love was the deepest.

My relationship with Peter’s character is the most complicated. Peter is ground down by the external, unchangeable realities of his life: he can’t touch his girlfriend because of her chronic illness, and his (other) college-aged girlfriend snaps pictures with her iPhone camera between her legs for money. He is handsome and smart, holding a philosophy degree, but we know he is miserable and jealous. Peter drinks and pops Xanax to cope with this reality, the loss of his father, his big brother worries over Ivan and expresses suicidal intent. His self-loathing is encased in posturing. Men’s Mental Health Month poster child.

I considered Sylvia the one I should truly feel for — is she not the one who suffers the most? Peter has her, but not completely: she spends most of the novel too prideful to be vulnerable and have sex with Peter since living in chronic pain prevents her from being intimate with him as she once was. Peter agonizes over his desire for Sylvia and his inability to have her wholly, the missing piece of physicality not fed by their emotional intimacy. He sleeps around with Noami and falls in love with her but feels tortured by his feelings for the two women. Most times I felt deep pity at his pain, other times I wanted to play him the world’s smallest violin and get out of his head. But his problems and pain are real, which is the point of Peter’s character — even if they come masked in masculinity, two girlfriends and success.

Is Peter jealous of Ivan’s intelligence? Is Ivan jealous of Peter being sought-after? When Peter’s consciousness reveals he finds speaking to Ivan “like talking to a dog,” we know it cuts deeper than envy that reduces these brothers into strangers.

It is not simple. The characters contradict and do not say what they mean, as humans do. I think I understand a character and the nuances of their relationships, then the next page I do not. Ultimately, Rooney makes us work to comprehend the Koubek’s hostility, whose relationship is the crux of the novel despite them not meeting face-to-face until a third of the text. They are together only three times throughout the book’s 400+ pages with most of their perspectives spent thinking of one another or being with their respective women.

This makes the text’s culmination a rewarding pay-off: a chance encounter with the brothers at their childhood home that gets physical. Occurring over 400 pages in, here is where the truth of their childhoods, parents, resentment and views of each other emerge. We come to understand their estrangement stems less from one problematic origin and more from the seeds of detestation that grow from being siblings and being different.

Rooney nudges into the layers of human interactions, taking pliers to the character’s experiences and jacking them open to reveal the meaning we assign to other’s actions. We see inside them, and then see how others perceive them. Through this, we learn what two people mean to one another: brothers, new lovers, college sweethearts, old friends.

For example, from Margaret’s perspective, we see her pay attention to, deliberate and appreciate the care Ivan handles her suitcase with. It is just a suitcase; it is just the action of it being lifted from the concrete to a car trunk. None of the other characters in the scene notice. But for Ivan and Margaret, two people unsure if each one’s spark of attraction is returned, the simple gestures encompass much more. For the first time, Ivan experiences what he calls “mutual desire.” Margaret defines it as being in the “same camp.” Whatever one calls it, it changes them forever.

The text’s overall ending provided gratification for Peter realizing his judgement of Margaret and her relationship with Ivan was wrong. Peter’s conclusion is not without its flaws: the women in his life do the emotional heavy lifting and call him out, then Rooney slaps a sudden, watery Band-Aid of polyamory over their love triangle. Still, ‘Intermezzo’ is a feat from Rooney, who is skilled at conveying character dynamics in ways that are bittersweet and beautiful. I read her work and feel blue and lifted at once. I feel I know the characters despite them being works of fiction plopped out of Rooney’s mind.

As I look for my next read, the YouTube algorithm keeps recommending chess videos to me. Maybe it is time to learn how to play.