Intermezzo by Sally Rooney review: ‘a frighteningly astute novel’

The propulsive energy of Sally Rooney’s latest novel is derived not from its plot, but from the meticulous self-questioning of the characters, writes Stuart Kelly

Although it is set in Dublin, the two main characters of Sally Rooney’s remarkable new novel are called Peter and Ivan Koubek; a lawyer and a semi-professional chess player. Their mother is Irish, their father was Slovakian, and yet a distinctly Russian atmosphere suffuses the book. The epithets “the Great” and “the Terrible” seem to swirl around the brothers in this precise, aching story. There is something Chekhovian about the suffocating scrutiny, something reminiscent of Dostoyevsky in the intense, nigh-pathological worrying over the right, the good and the proper way to behave. It is in no way a summary of the book, but the reader must be prepared for “Final agonies. Inevitability of death. Meaningless existence, false scaffold of morality assembled around nothing. The final permanent nothing that is the only truth”. The title, meaning literally “that which is between”, inevitably conjures Beckett: “They give birth astride the grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more”. That musically the intermezzo is usually both light and brief is daringly sardonic here.

Peter and Ivan’s father has just died at the beginning of the book, and both men have a strained relationship with their remarried mother. Peter is the elder, a successful barrister specialising in unfair employment practices. He still has a significant friendship with his first love, Sylvia, an academic who suffers chronic pain after an accident; however, his current girlfriend Naomi is ten years younger, squatting, making some money from posts of herself online and who informs Peter “you can do whatever you like with me”. Ivan is ten years younger than Peter, a “complete oddball” – Peter uses the trying-to-be-polite phrase “I think he’s kind of autistic, although I guess you can’t say that now” – and seems to have peaked as a chess player. That said, he still plays exhibition games for local clubs, which is where he meets Margaret, the arts centre manager, and a divorcee more than a decade older than him. It seems as if Ivan has no concept of what Lacan calls “the Big Other”. He does not conform to social blandishments or white lies: ethics trumps etiquette with him. Ivan and Peter are decidedly not united by grief over their father’s death, and a tentative relationship between Ivan and Margaret develops just as Peter, insomniac and self-medicating, becomes less able to keep his disparate relationships discrete or discreet.

In some ways, that’s it. There are satellite characters, and a major crisis moment, where Peter asks Ivan a gauche question prefaced by the phrase “do you think a normal woman… ?”, but the entire propulsive energy of the book is in the meticulous self-questioning and forensic anatomising of the characters. “Stream of consciousness” does not quite capture it, especially as this implies some separation between thought and feeling. It is as if we are given intimate access to the very moment of a psychological state bubbling up, solidifying and being understood. This is accomplished by a particular syntax, frequently verbless, using gerunds and inverting order, which the reader quickly attunes to, and which is not stylistically flagrant or gratingly conspicuous. For example – and these are selected by randomly opening the novel – we read “Sour taste in his dry mouth he glances…”, “the room he thinks hot”, “blotchy her face he thinks”, “rinses in the bathroom sink the bowl”, “warm he feels the weight of her body resting”. This is textured like interiority. It is as close as one gets to inhabiting another mind in an artform that insists on the unknowability of other selves.

Intermezzo is a frighteningly astute novel, and somehow it does not feel overlong at 437 pages. It seem otiose to have a small appendix detailing borrowings from Shakespeare, Sontag and Bertrand Russell; the quotes flow naturally within Rooney’s own prose and flagging them seems unnecessarily needy, as if to prove a work about microscopic fluctuations in feelings is smart too. The philosophical rigour behind the book in no way impedes on it being incarnated in human consciousnesses: indeed, it depends upon the bodily. Rooney writes – and I write this rarely – extremely well about desire and sex, not in a manner that is as such erotic, but rather complex, conflicted, aghast and shy.

The chess in the novel is not allegorical, but there are feints, sacrifices, stalemates and holding things in check. More significantly, given the small cast, there is a chess-like manipulation of possible encounters and confrontation. In its own dry-eyed and adamantine way, this is an affirmative novel. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to mention the final line is caustically qualified version of Molly Bloom’s “yes” – “Go on in any case living”. In its own way it is darker than Dorothy Parker’s “Guns aren’t lawful, / Nooses give, / Gas smells awful. / You might as well live.” Rooney’s novel argues that not committing suicide is perhaps more painful but is nonetheless infinitely more necessary than the alternative. Moreover, there is something profoundly uplifting about being able to recommend a novel wholeheartedly and say “this is what this form and this form alone is still able to do”. Also: a worthy addition to the Great Dogs of Literature Hall of Fame with Alexei (another Tsar as well).

Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney, Faber & Faber, £20