Sally Rooney’s fourth novel is not exactly her best, nor likely to be her best loved. In her last book, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), a character – fresh from reading Henry James – enthuses: “Have you ever read such a juicy novel?” It’s not a question most readers of her new one will come away exclaiming. But if Intermezzo is not Rooney’s juiciest novel, it is her meatiest. The thickness of the book – her first to exceed 400 pages – is a clue that it will not resemble the sleek vehicles for sexual tension that made her famous. Intermezzo lacks the taut self-assurance of Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), but it is an honourable, tenacious and not unsuccessful attempt to go beyond them, and to leave – indeed to run some distance from – her formal comfort zone.
Intermezzo hews to Rooney’s signature geometry – couples whose romantic happiness is temporarily obstructed for our entertainment – but ups the stakes. Conversations with Friends and Normal People feature illness – mental and physical – and difficult family situations, especially those arising from absent or erratic fathers. But serious material tended to be a kind of background noise, with little direct bearing on the romantic action. In Intermezzo such issues – bereavement, depression, addiction – are central, and impinge on the characters’ love lives. Conversations with Friends and Normal People are youthful, summery novels (both feature a semi-climactic holiday in a European villa). Intermezzo is an adult, autumnal book set in and around dark, rainy Dublin.
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