Published in 2024, this is by Sally Rooney, with whom I have a slightly mixed reading history. I wasn't bowled over by Conversations With Friends, but was intrigued enough to want to read more. I thought Normal People was fabulous. Then I REALLY struggled with Beautiful World, Where Are You?.

But I felt I couldn't miss out on Intermezzo, and in Ireland, I finally got round to listening to it. I'm so glad, because I really liked it. It's warm, compassionate, and insightful. There's even (kind of, maybe...) a happy ending.

Eanna Hardwicke narrates it absolutely superbly. Accents, voices, moods, pace: all brilliant. And listening to it with Irish voices all around me in the real world added an extra dimension.



***

Beware spoilers in what follows...

It's a Sally Rooney novel, so it focuses -- obviously (a word her characters use a lot) -- on relationships. There are three somewhat unusual male-female pairings that I'll come back to in a minute.

But where I thought Intermezzo was most impressively perceptive was in its analysis of sibling relations. We have two brothers. Peter and Ivan Koubek. Ten years apart. Peter is 32.5 (we know, because he's precisely half-way to the age at which his father recently died). He's the urbane, outwardly successful brother, with the law career and the ability to turn heads everywhere. Ivan, who will celebrate his 23rd birthday at the end of the novel, is very bright (a "chess genius", says Peter), but introspective, unconventional, financially unstable, and socially ill at ease.

We see Ivan first through Peter's disparaging eyes. And we physically wince at the condescension on display: For Peter, he's a "young lad", an "adolescent", a "complete oddball".

So when we meet Ivan for ourselves we're surprised how charming he is. Shy. Gentle. Unassuming. Margaret, a very nice woman of 36, obviously likes him a lot. And he proves willing not only to open up about his own feelings, but also to listen when she talks about hers. Margaret is separated from her alcoholic husband, and responsible, listening men are probably a nice surprise.

That's the first slightly unusual pairing. Margaret is quite a bit older than Ivan (obviously), and she's really conscious of that, really concerned that she might be cementing him into a relationship that can't possibly last, but might stop him looking for more conventional partners. Age gaps can be problematic (just look at Elizabeth von Arnim's Love), but hey, no-one's talking about life-commitments here, and no-one's exploiting anyone else, so can it be so bad? Ivan doesn't see that it can. Margaret has a more jittery conscience.

Peter, meanwhile, thinks it's very, very bad, ridiculously bad, and he marks it down as another instance of Ivan's being weird. Over one of their rare shared lunches, he responds to his brother's news with a shrivelling assessment: "You're twenty-two, you're hardly out of college, you don't even have a job. I'm not trying to be disparaging, but do you think a normal woman of her age would want to hang around with someone in your situation?"

Uh-oh... "In a deliberately quiet almost hissing voice Ivan says: I actually hate you. I've hated you my entire life... Fundamentally Peter is a bad person, Ivan thinks, and Ivan's own life would be in no sense worse and arguably a lot better if he never had to see or speak to him ever again."

I'll come back to this. As I said, the brothers' relationship is the most interesting facet of the novel.


"Waiting at the lights to cross O'Connell Street..."

***

Meanwhile, it's Peter who's more of a candidate for the screw-up epithet. Drink, drugs, confusion... Insomnia... Hints right from the beginning of suicidal ideas. And Rooney's style reflects this. The novel is told totally in the third person, but the sections that relate events through Peter's eyes are jerky, fragmented, and erratic. It's stream of consciousness where that consciousness is more than a little influenced by pills. Ivan's style is much gentler -- more contemplative, and self-questioning.

Peter is grieving, of course. (Another novel about grieving...) And his relationship with his dead father was problematic. Mum (Christine) decamped a long time ago, and set up home with a new partner and his children. So Peter often felt that HE was forced to become the protector of both father and younger brother, a situation that left him nowhere to go with his own issues. He and Dad had little to say to each other; and he felt his (immigrant) father deferred to him way too much: "Impressed by him, intimidated. I'll leave that to you, Peter, you know more about these things. If you say so, I'm sure you're right. Making himself small, and smaller, until no longer there." Grief is always more difficult to handle when it comes freighted with guilt and unresolved issues.

Ivan's grief is different. He got on well with his father, and what is tormenting him is the increasing realization of the finality of death: "Now that the event has come and gone, the funeral, the various rituals, only the loss remains, which can never be recuperated. The event is over, the event has been overcome, and yet the loss is only beginning."

But it's not just grief over his father's death that's derailing Peter. Several years earlier he was faced with tragedy when his adored girlfriend, Sylvia, was involved in an accident that left her in constant pain, unable to live a "normal" life in any of its aspects. Not wanting to burden Peter, she broke off the relationship. Despite strings of subsequent girlfriends, he has never truly been able to move on. Now, because she had been a friend to all the family, the death brings Sylvia and Peter back into contact in a deeper way. (There is pushback, by the way, against this Sylvia plotline, eg here -- "The positioning of Sylvia's disability... comes off as crass at best and stigmatizing at worst." I'm not sure what I'm missing, but I can't agree. Rooney is giving us a dilemma that sounds fairly believable...)

So Peter definitely still loves her. But she's still resisting any kind of commitment: "The kind of relationship you're talking about, where I'm the only woman in your life and you give up everything for me, I don't want that. Honestly, I don't. It's just too much pressure. I'm sorry... What happened to me, she says. Let's be honest, Peter, it ruined my life. And I'm trying to tell you that I'm not going to let it ruin yours." She remembers what they used to have, and doesn't want to be "offering something very inferior".

And yet, and yet... Towards the end of the book, Sylvia admits that she never TRULY wanted him to go. "She has hated him all along for leaving her, he knows that, and he has hated her for telling him to go." Also true, however, is her clear-eyed assessment: "If we had stayed together, you would have ended up hating me, Peter. And if you had left me, I would have hated you."

A true conundrum.


"River dissected by the glitter of sunlight, Grattan Bridge..."

And then there's "the other"... Peter's other love interest, that is. Naomi. Sensual, spontaneous, permanently broke, not unintelligent, but the absolute opposite of the cerebral Professor Sylvia. And she's the same age as Ivan, who is incensed by Peter's hypocrisy...

Naomi started out as just a game for Peter, a recreation, not a serious relationship. But he has grown to genuinely love her ("such an absurdity: like a stage fight where it turns out the knives are real"). Conversely, while she's initially depicted as self-interested and exploitative, we gradually gain a fuller picture of a sensitive and generous woman. She is the first to pick up that something is terribly wrong with Peter's state of mind, for example. She genuinely cares.

Sylvia and Naomi know about each other (though not really ALL about each other). Peter has never pretended to be monogamous. But he feels increasingly driven to CHOOSE. He's torn by guilt for a start: "Because he has given each woman reason to believe that he is actually in love with her. Worse: because he himself has believed it... And now, as if waking at last from a nonsensical dream, he surveys in terror the disorder of his life."

How to choose, though? He attempts to think it through: "Pitting one philosophy against another. Maturity against youth. Yes, sobriety against decadence, intellect against appetite, he could go on. Better instead to specify. On the one hand, the love of his life, high principle of his conscience, his complicated feelings for whom have prevented him, let's be honest, from developing any kind of serious attachment to anyone else for the last, whatever, fourteen years... On the other hand, his captive, his tormentor, on whom he has lavished how much money, jewellery, gifts, who likes it a little rough, who has with mischievous pleasure outwitted him at every move, and with whom he is feebly and defeatedly in love. Each attempt to contend with her, to win back some little portion of his pride, has only sunk him deeper. Good against evil."

So, what to do? "There is only one way out," he tells himself. "She, or the other. Could of course just have done with the whole thing and walk in front of a bus..."



***

Just a couple more observations before I get back to the sibling relationship, and also the way the book ends.

First, mothers... It's hard being a mother. And Rooney's mothers come in for a lot of stick. Naomi's mother was an alcoholic, forcing her daughter to grow up far too quickly. Ivan has the distinct impression that Christine prefers her stepchildren to her own, and she and Peter, it seems, have always felt the need to spar. They're both "dominant personalities", Ivan explains. Margaret also feels that her mother is never happy with her, siding with the alcoholic husband rather than her daughter, clearly "longing for years to catch Margaret in the wrong", and falling on the Ivan relationship with cruel glee.

Second, class. Another of the multiple reasons Peter is not that comfortable in his own skin is that he's jumped class. Clearly, there's more dramatic stuff contributing to Peter's fractured state of mind, but Rooney obviously feels this aspect is significant: "Some of his friends have rich parents... They are what they are, and he is what he is. Work they get from friends while he has to look out for himself. Unwritten dress codes, rules of speech. Oh, we have a house out there, lovely part of the world. And where did you go to school. Living at home in Ranelagh while he pays half his earnings in rent. What they were born to, he has to work for." Ivan despises his brother for being "obsessed with fitting in with his lawyer friends".


"Grand old terraces, coloured lights blinking on and off in the high handsome windows..."

***

Anyway, back to the brothers:

At one point, Peter gives his oh-so-succinct summary of his relationship with Ivan: "He hates me because he thinks I'm an arrogant prick, and I look down on him because I think he's a fucking loser."

Yeah...

I think there's a lot of truth in this analysis of older/younger dynamics. Things might not be so dramatic as they are with Peter and Ivan, and most people probably stay more polite, but this kind of mismatch is probably more often the driver of sibling problems than we realize. The older sibling often finds it hard to forget that the younger one is no longer a child, and often finds it difficult to countenance a way of life that diverges from the trail the pioneering sibling has blazed. There's fault on both sides (Rooney-obviously): Older siblings need to be more sensitive; younger siblings need to be less on the defensive. But unchecked, it's a pernicious divide.

Once upon a time, Ivan idolized Peter. But Peter's pain over his break-up with Sylvia pushed him into a place of need. Ivan was too young to deal with that, and Peter resented what he saw as a lack of compassion. That's the beginning of the widening breach they can't seem to outrun: Peter came across as "laughing, dismissive"; Ivan found himself increasingly incensed by "his brother's smirking superiority".

The difference in the way Ivan and Peter speak to each other and interact with third parties is enormous. With others, they are adults, sensitive to their interlocutors, intelligent, and self-aware. With each other, they immediately fall back into the predetermined tramlines of older/younger, patronizing/resentful sibling relations.

The nadir for Peter is a nasty confrontation with Sylvia, followed by a physical fight with Ivan. At that point our outwardly suave lawyer is terribly close to suicide... He lurches off to Christine, who -- we are slightly surprised to see -- does and says more or less the right things.

He eventually arrives back home to find both Naomi and Sylvia in his flat, beside themselves with worry (and realizing that they like and respect each other).


"Train rattling over the coast. Dark sea torn by brittle white breakers, gulls floating black against grey sky..."

***

So how does Rooney wrap this all up? Well, it's not candy-floss, but it's not tear-your-heart-out either.

Eventually, aided by the attitudes of these three incredibly tolerant and responsive women, Peter and Ivan reach a tentative rapprochement. This involves their both having the courage and grace to admit failure, and apologize. Which they do. For sure, it's all a bit fragile, but it's a step forward.

Ivan and Margaret are determined to stick it out. Will their thing last? Who knows? But why should they artificially sabotage something that currently makes them happy just because others disapprove?

And Peter? Well, Sylvia has mooted the idea of "some kind of arrangement"; Naomi has a friend who's in a throuple ("please never say that word to me again," says Peter)... Can this unconventional set-up work for all of them?

There are tentative plans for Christmas, which Ivan and Margaret want to host. All five of them, perhaps? Peter muses: "All of them loved and complicatedly needed, for better or worse. Inextricable. The tangled web... Picture them all there together... Nothing is fixed... See what happens. Go on in any case living." That's where we close...


"Do you feel up to going for a walk?... Yes please, he replies. Stephen's Green?"

***

Positive though I am, there are one or two things I'd take issue with:

-- There's still this faintly pretentious overlay that Rooney seems determined to include. She can't bear us not to know how clever our characters are, it seems. For example, here are Peter and Sylvia: "They go on walking, talking about fascist aesthetics and the modernist movement. Neoclassicism, obsessive fixation on ethnic difference, thematics of decadence, bodily strength and weakness. Purity or death. Pound, Eliot. And on the other hand, Woolf, Joyce. Usefulness and specificity of fascism as a political typology in the present day. Aesthetic nullity of contemporary political movements in general. Related to, or just coterminous with, the almost instantaneous corporate capture of emergent visual styles." But this stuff is not nearly as intrusive or irritating as it was in Beautiful World. And there is a point to it here, showing us that Peter can have intellectual conversations with Sylvia that are impossible with Naomi.

-- For me, Rooney slightly overuses inverted sentences. Examples: "Sore his eyes and hot he felt"; "Dark her lips slightly parted. Mouth he has how many times kissed." This kind of thing is powerful, but only if it's employed sparingly.

-- I wondered whether the women are TOO good to be true... Too tolerant and open-minded in the case of Sylvia and Naomi? Too empathetic and understanding in the case of Margaret? Dunno... We do see that Sylvia can be cruel, and Naomi can be manipulative. But overall they're pretty saintly, all things considered.

-- And I wonder a little bit about the ending... Too upbeat after the dramas of the narrative? Too abrupt a change? Not that Rooney holds out any promise of permanence. No-one is saying this arrangement will, or should, go on for ever. It's a short-term maybe-happy possibility, not a long-term guarantee. Still, it's not a tragedy. Not yet anyway. Is that realistic? Again, I don't know. Yet, definitely, I didn't want it all to go wrong for any of them. I really didn't. I was definitely invested in the characters. So, I guess, why not? We all need a bit of hope in our lives...

***

Heller McAlpin points out that one of the meanings of the word intermezzo is an unexpected move in chess that requires an immediate response: "The narrative of Intermezzo, in which Rooney continually rearranges her characters like pieces on a chessboard, features many game-changing surprise moves." Maybe that's what all our relationships need: More of an ability to be creative and responsive.

Peter wonders at one point: "What can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking." And the answer is, as McAlpin points out: "Apparently -- like this novel -- quite a lot."