Intermezzo: Sally Rooney Paperback – 24 Sept. 2024

Intermezzo is the first Sally Rooney novel I’ve read. Given the criticisms Rooney receives (amongst the accolades), I was relieved to find it easy to read and surprised to find it unputdownable. It wasn’t perfect of course, as to be expected of a young writer’s fourth novel. I’ll start with my criticisms, before coming to, for me, the most compelling character in the book: Peter.*Intermezzo is written from the alternating and intermingling points of view of three characters: Peter, Ivan, and Margaret, and includes long sections of stream of consciousness. This is an established literary style, but is difficult to pull off technically, because clearly nobody thinks in sustained verbal soliloquies in real life. The writer has to invent a language in which to verbalise consciousness. In this book, for example, Peter often thinks in jumbled phrases and truncated sentences, conveying how confused and stressed he is. Ivan, who may be coded as autistic, thinks in clearer, detached, analytical language, which makes his thought process easier to read. Rooney handles all this very well, on the whole. But it seemed to me that as the novel went on, Ivan became less and less “autistic”, and that separate streams of consciousness became less distinct from each other, as if all three viewpoint characters had developed a similar thinking style–that style being Rooney’s default style, maybe. This made Ivan an unconvincing character for me, because I don’t buy that such a mentally rigid individual could blossom so rapidly into a sensitive, thoughtful lover.Because Intermezzo depends so much on point-of-view, I felt that Rooney left herself with no way of describing the external world objectively. It felt to me that as soon as she attempted to do so, the writing dropped off a cliff. For example, when Ivan and Margaret went for a walk along a lane, Rooney ended the section with this:“Ivan says nothing, just goes on walking beside her in the cold, bright air. From the field beside the laneway, a small sturdy sheep watches them passing, its dirty fleece silvered with rainfall, its face velvet black. Golden-green fields stretching out into the faint blue distance. Limitless clear air and light everywhere around them, filled with the sweet liquid singing of birds.”When Rooney tries this sort of stuff, she could, in my opinion, be any two-bit author. For me, it works neither as pathetic fallacy nor as an evocation of the Irish countryside.*OK, let me come to what blew my mind about this book: the character of Peter Koubek. I have to give Rooney credit for attempting to write that unsympathetic, socially irrelevant but concerning character, the struggling male. I identified so intensely with this poor man. He’s trapped in a situation, mainly of his own making, where he is the high-earning male, the leader, the purse-stringer, the buck–stops-here fixer and problem solver. And no-one realises, at least not till it’s almost too late (“Am I having a breakdown?”) that he’s falling apart inside.I’m not going to do the gammon moan that straight, “normal” white men are now the social victims. Because overall, men still earn more money, rise higher in most jobs, have more freedom, act more aggressively, more sexually irresponsibly, etc., etc. But Rooney, I think, is addressing the phenomenon of the secretly depressed male who, out of the blue, ends it all, without admitting his struggle, without anyone noticing his plight. Peter just can’t do anything right: he upsets, sometimes quite suddenly and dramatically, the people in his relationship circle. The thing is, he doesn’t mean to–he’s trying to do the right thing, but it always backfires. So he starts to despise himself; and it seems there's no way out. Yet Rooney’s portrait of him is balanced. She shows him again and again to be well-meaning and generous, for which no one gives him credit (nor does he expect any). They just see it as self-serving, manipulative; “waving your dick around”, as Naomi calls it after he comes to get her out of police custody.I wanted to write about Peter here, because as I read through the reviews for Intermezzo, I noticed that little account is taken of Peter. So he is being overlooked as a character just as he was by other people in the book, and for similar reasons. Several reviewers say they actively disliked him. Such is the fate of this kind of male, I guess. These days, particularly in literary circles and on social media, priority is given to women and minorities, such as LGBT, BAME, and to people with neurodivergence. Which is as it should be, of course, to help rebalance against the social advantages held by neurotypical, cis males.But I’m glad Rooney took the character of Peter on, and in such a nuanced way. I felt seen. These days, women are writing (and reading) more literary novels than men, who are increasingly sticking to genre, where men can still be heroes. So there’s a recent dearth of realistic books written from a male point of view. It could be said that, as a woman, Rooney can’t get every detail of male POV right. Sure. But if men aren’t going to do it in serious fiction, it’s wonderful that some female authors will. (Recently, Dolly Alderton, as well, wrote about a break-up from a male POV.) Thoughtful women know how important men are still, because they live with them, love them, make love with them; and they have sons, brothers, and fathers.The character of Peter moved me. I felt so anxious for him. Thank you, Sally Rooney.

I loved this book, but like her other work I wish that Rooney would use speech marks!The relationships and interactions are gripping, and I feel like I want to be in the room with these characters as they continue their lives - a wonderful examination of grief and love in all its forms.

I liked the character of Margaret, and Peter, the others felt a little less convincing/sketches of people, in my view. Overall enjoyable especially last part.

I love love loved both ‘Normal People‘ and ‘Conversations with Friends‘ but didn’t get on all that well with ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You‘ so was a little apprehensive going into Sally Rooney’s latest novel, ‘Intermezzo’.I needn’t have worried, because oh my goodness, I loved it!I read this book a few months ago and am only just getting round to reviewing, but it’s stuck with me so well since then, which is always a sign of a good read!The book focusses on two men, brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek. Peter is 30 something, successfully and competently working in Dublin as a lawyer. Ivan is 22, socially awkward, a reserved chess prodigy. Following their father’s death, the brothers take different paths in their grief, navigating a world without the man who raised them. With a large 10 year gap between the two, this is the story of them trying to understand one another, perhaps for the first time in their lives. The novel that plays out is, in my opinion, the most complex of plots in a Rooney book so far.“No one is perfect. Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.”Switching between points of view throughout, I found it really interesting how Rooney chose different writing styles for each character, reflecting their personalities. Ivan’s world is chess and Rooney cleverly uses the game as a metaphor for the internal struggles that her characters face, mirroring their emotional battles and a desire to win. His chapters are more clipped, more fragmented than his brother’s, whose chapters seemed a little more familiar to Rooney’s usual style.A more mature read than her other work, both men’s lives and personalities are explored deeply and the depiction of sibling love and rivalry was written so accurately that you could believe these were real people. Both brothers are seeking success and happiness, and their deep, long, internal monologues really made me, as the reader, appreciate Rooney’s talent in confronting feelings of grief and despair without making this a sad and dreary read. It’s so interesting to consider grief beyond death… grief for things that didn’t happen, couldn’t happen, the life we wanted and the life we got.Overall rating: With themes of brotherhood, grief, despair and loneliness, Sally Rooney’s latest novel, ‘Intermezzo’ is a sensational read – 5 stars!

I saw a lot of people tweeting about this book on Twitter so had to buy myself a copy as I had somehow missed the ability to pre-review it prior to publicationI’m found it hard to settle into reading this book initially yhe author has a very distinctive writing style with incomplete sentences and lots of very short sentences mimicking thought processes this quite unusual.and took some getting used to .after a few hours reading it started to feel more natural and I settled into the bookThe story brings out a lot of the thoughts that we repress and I found myself empathising mainly with the socially awkward, probably autistic chess master Ivan the most. The Autistic character seems very real and authentic. I have a number of autistic friends and I can see elements of all of us in him.I liked the idea that there was someone for everyone in the awkward main character? Ultimately finds his love match not necessarily where he was expecting it ?The novel has some of the best most authentic sex scenes I’ve read messy bits and allThis author is well known after Normal People her previous novel and I’m sure this book will be loved by her loyal leadership. I liked but didn’t love it.This review would appear on Goodreads and my book blog bionic Sarah S books on Wordpress I will also publish it on Amazon UK.