BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Intermezzo (Sally Rooney, author)

Brothers, death of a parent, grief, healing, neuro-atypical character, May-December and December-May romances, polyamory, chess.

Critically-acclaimed author, Sally Rooney, is back with her latest novel. Intermezzo is a fresh and compelling story about two Dublin brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, as they navigate their loves and their lives in the year following their father’s death, and come apart and back together in grief and healing. Their parents divorced 16 years before their father’s death and both men have a rocky relationship with their mother. 

Peter is ten years Ivan’s senior. At 32, Peter is a relatively affluent practicing solicitor in Dublin. He is embroiled in two complex relationships with women. His first serious love, Sylvia, is a brilliant, young university professor of English. He and Sylvia enjoyed a long, serious and intense romance years prior. Sylvia was then involved in an unnamed accident which left her in perpetual pain which rendered her unable to engage in a traditional sexual relationship. Following the accident, she broke off her relationship with Peter to liberate him from her painful future. The break did not end Peter’s connection and love for her. Because he cannot have Sylvia, Peter begins what he expects will be a casual sexual relationship with Naomi, almost 10 years his junior. However, he and Naomi become attached to one another. 

Ivan is twenty-two, wears braces on his teeth, is neuroatypical, and a young chess prodigy. He struggles to read social cues or understand common relational interactions. He is  literal in almost all things. He is also a deep thinker; Ivan and carefully considers and analyzes questions of all kinds, about what he thinks of common experiences or interactions, how he is feeling, what he likes and dislikes. He is blessed with an earnestness and honesty that is winning and endearing. He is wise beyond his years. Ivan has completed his education but is not conventionally employed. He competes in chess tournaments and freelances data analytics gigs to pay his bills. Until his father’s early death after a five year battle with cancer, Ivan lived at home with his father. 

At a suburban weekend chess tournament, Ivan meets Margaret, the community center’s program director and the two, almost to their own surprise and delight, bond and begin a romance. They keep their affair secret, primarily because of their age difference, and because Margaret is separated but not divorced from her alcoholic former husband. 

Peter and Ivan each stumble along in their respective love lives. Over lunch one day, Ivan discloses his relationship and Margaret’s age to Peter. Despite his own December-May relationship with Naomi, Peter immediately questions Ivan’s judgment and Margaret’s motives. Deeply protective of Margaret, Ivan is enraged with Peter and the brothers become estranged. Meanwhile, Peter toggles back and forth between the intellectual compatibility and history he and Sylvia share and the sexual chemistry and emotional bond growing between Naomi and him. He cannot let go of either woman. 

Events and emotions conspire to both out Ivan and Margaret’s secret romance, and to compel Peter to choose between Sylvia and Naomi. Meanwhile each of the brothers is struggling with their solitary grief over their father’s death and the unmooring they each feel, particularly given the combination of their disconnection with their mother and their estrangement from one another. 

Rooney is a gifted chronicler of meaningful details. She simultaneously sketches a scene and uses the scene’s carefully selected details to build out a character. She captures personal habits, observations, sights, sounds, smells, foods, mundane choices and snippets of conversation. Together her selections form such a complete picture of her protagonists that they seem to step off the page and into the room. Inch by inch Rooney peels back the protective shells that Ivan and Peter have each built around his vulnerability and his self-awareness. 

The brothers’ estrangement cannot hold;  each ultimately is his brother’s keeper and salvation. Peter approaches a mental health crisis and entertains suicidal thoughts in his loneliness and despair. As he crumbles, young Ivan seems to grow more fully into himself, particularly when he allows himself to be fully honest with Margaret. When honesty breaks through, either by accident or intentionally, resolution is not far away. 

Not only is Intermezzo is not only an exploration of complex grief and healing; it is a celebration of the unconventional, the unglamorous and the unpopular. Neuro-atyplical people, chess nerds, May-December romances, and people involved in polyamorous relationships stand at the fringes of society and often outside of accepted norms. The author of Normal People ironically humanizes the outliers and those who live in the grays of life.She challenges us to recognize our biases, acknowledge the limits of our limiting points of view in order abandon fixed ideas of normal or acceptable and to embrace instead the universal and wonderfully rich and idiosyncratic uniqueness of difference. 

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