Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, the Sept. 24 addition to her oeuvre, is a novel chronicling the tumultuous relationship between the Dublin-based 22-year-old competitive chess player Ivan Koubek and his 32-year-old barrister brother Peter after the death of their father. Or, more suitably, Intermezzo is a novel chronicling the men’s relationship with women. What could have been a novel interrogating a variety of worthy themes — the function of grief and trauma in love, the explosive or inopportune nature of fate or the destructiveness of family — is instead a novel that reads like a pubescent teenage boy preoccupied with sex.
Intermezzo suffers from an over-dependence on sexual themes, which shortchanges the development of the plot, in turn stunting the reader’s connection with the characters. The Achilles’ heel of Rooney’s Intermezzo is not just the fact that it’s fixated on sex. Rather, Intermezzo lacks the self-awareness to raise Rooney above the disagreeable beliefs of her characters.
Rooney’s body of work has walked the line between sophistication and smut before, and while I believe it succeeded in the case of Normal People — a New York Times 100 Notable Books 2019 and Hulu miniseries adaptation — Intermezzo has fallen short and resigned itself to being 481-page voyeuristic nonsense. Unless it’s from AO3, Wattpad or Danielle Steel, I wouldn’t take sex in literature to translate to sexual pleasure for the reader. Instead, I believe sex in literature is supposed to carry plot, or somehow further the story.
In a similar manner to her novel Normal People, Rooney doesn’t waste time before stooping to sex as a sellout storytelling device. And yet, whereas the sex in Normal People serves a greater purpose, in Intermezzo it’s nothing more than a pornographic mess, neither meaningful nor comfortable to read because of the thematic entanglement with inappropriate age gaps and abusive or toxic dynamics.
Take, for example, the first time Ivan has sex with Margaret, the coordinator of a chess event in which he participates. The reader doesn’t know more than Margaret’s name and the fact that she’s 36 before Margaret and Ivan are in bed, forcing the reader through Margaret’s guilty and self-punishing train of thought about their 14-year age gap.
This sexual experience could have been meaningful to the narrative if it expanded on the conflict of Is this allowed? But instead, Ivan and Margaret only occasionally discuss their age gap throughout the novel with each conversation ending in sex, the issue shrugged off and forgotten. While Rooney has the content or evidence to make a comment on age gaps in relationships here, she stops short of leaving any argument in the text that would repudiate the controversial topics with which she plays.
The reader may believe they can take refuge in the shift of perspective from Ivan to Peter, but they would be mistaken: Peter’s superfluously sex-dependent narrative is equally as severe as Ivan’s, with the added frustration of following Peter’s perspective through sentence-fragmented, stream-of-consciousness writing serving no purpose to the story.
Introducing another age-gap relationship, 32-year-old Peter has a 22-year-old girlfriend in college named Naomi who has a history with abusive men — including Peter himself, on whom Naomi is financially dependent. Rooney wrote Marianne, the nuanced female lead of Normal People, with a similar history but was able to separate herself from her characters to comment on Marianne’s self-harming trauma cycle. In Intermezzo, however, Rooney does not inject the same self-awareness necessary to transform that cycle into commentary. One of Intermezzo’s scenes describes Naomi begging Peter to hit her, and he does.
Rooney doesn’t mention this event again, nor does she include any serious internal conflict from Peter. Rather, she observes through Peter that people Naomi’s age only like getting hit and spit in their mouths. While some may argue the neglect of this scene is “subtlety,” I do not believe that is the case. By ignoring and trivializing this scene, Rooney perpetuates the harmful mindset beyond her text. She doesn’t linger on her craft long enough to equip the reader with textual evidence to conclude a better meaning out of this event, and her myopia is further proven by the conclusion to Naomi’s and Peter’s story — the formation of a polyamorous relationship in which Naomi is blamed for Peter’s shortcomings and made into his sex object.
No interaction between a romantically involved man and woman in Rooney’s work can begin and remain platonic without veering drastically off course into the sexual; even conversations that begin discussing dead dads and grief end with sex.
Sylvia, the other participant in Peter’s polyamorous fantasy granted by Rooney, had an accident that racked her with chronic pain and left her incapable of performing penetrative sex. Rooney writes this as the end of Sylvia’s relationship with Peter, consistently stating how it was Sylvia’s choice and fault to end the relationship because, Rooney implies, it could never be complete without penetrative sex. Sylvia also believes that the end of this relationship and opportunity for sex ruined her life.
Rooney further implies that Peter is allowed his polyamorous relationship so he can fulfill having one “normal” relationship: Naomi for sex, Sylvia for love. This not only cements a damaging view of romantic relationships — that sex is necessary — but also grossly objectifies Naomi and Sylvia.
All the raw material is here for an interpretation on how this is men’s view of women, seeing as the two key characters are Ivan and Peter. But that’s a generous interpretation that would require the reader to reach outside the text for support. Not every shortcoming can be branded as subtlety.
The prime real estate of any novel (the middle) is wasted in Intermezzo because of a sex-filled plateau through this section. During this period, the plot doesn’t progress and the pacing slows. When this draught of meaningful content is at last brought to a close, Rooney has written herself into a corner: With the end approaching, she has little space to finish what she started, and so the non-sex-obsessed reader is disappointed by the hasty tying together of plot.
It was like reading an essay in which the writer forgot the prompt until the end and suddenly began stuffing the text with buzzwords and forgotten themes. The product is the neglected backstories Rooney set up for her characters.
Margaret has an ex-husband named Ricky who was an alcoholic — that’s all the reader is given, despite repetitively beating this uninteresting, one-sided fact to death mention after mention. Naomi’s history with abusive men is left at large, as is the precise nature of Sylvia’s accident that was oh-so pivotal yet simultaneously underdeveloped.
The effect of this is a roster of two-dimensional, static characters representing the entirety of women in Rooney’s Intermezzo. Despite her past accomplishment with Marianne, the women in Intermezzo come catastrophically closer to the “women written by men” phenomenon.
For a cast of underdeveloped side characters, the novelist could be forgiven if they had solid protagonists — but Intermezzo doesn’t. Rooney’s work is often confrontational in nature, and her subject matter meant to be disagreed with. But in Intermezzo, Rooney doesn’t take the time to contradict the harmful messages in her text. She instead expects the reader to be intimately familiar with her personal beliefs or past works to know that she likely isn’t promoting these ideas.
For example, Ivan — the protagonist with whom the reader is supposed to most easily connect, based on his victimization by Peter and the side characters’ defense of Ivan — is an unaddressed misogynist who believes (or believed, though no resolution is given in the text) that women who claim to have been raped are liars. This is never unpacked in the text, and it’s incongruous with Ivan’s character.
By mentioning such a grave subject that doesn’t even serve the purpose of believable or decent characterization, Rooney minimizes the reality she mines in search of cheap meaning. This un-utilized piece of evidence then has an ugly way of coming to life and leaping beyond the page because it isn’t dealt with in the text.
Peter, while being a proclaimed feminist and correcting some of Ivan’s views in a fruitless he-said-she-said debate, is no better. His behavior throughout the novel does not meet the task of the feminist ideals he preaches. Despite being an attorney who wins a sexual discrimination lawsuit, Peter is a womanizer who further victimizes not only Naomi, but also Sylvia.
Intermezzo is a story with poorly written women and morally objectionable men, none of whom have a cause the reader can endorse. By the end of the novel, the reader finds themself asking, What was the point of it all?
Intermezzo is also the logical next-read for the diehard Rooney fanatic. Upon finishing the novel, however, that same fanatic will find themself at a crossroads: How could my beloved Irish author have written this? Intermezzo, no matter who you ask, will stand out as the ugly duckling among Rooney’s works, unlikely to ever reach the beautiful swan stage.
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