A Conversation With Friends: Sally Rooney's 'Intermezzo'
A review in conversation: Can we ever really know each other? How do we communicate with the people we love?
Minor spoilers held within
No matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t find a way to carry it all.
In one hand, I grasped an empty coffee cup, while my pockets were filled with cans and cans of Perelló olives (I’ll be the first to admit that this is a cliché, but they’re just so delicious). In my other hand, I held two bags of mandarins and lemons. My shirt rode up my chest, exposing my somewhat unflattering stomach and chest hair. I had cut my Pixies T-shirt too short. Is it kind of cute, the way it rides up? Is there too much belly? Christ, I need to go to the gym more… I must look ridiculous with my pockets full of olives… Hey, at least the lemons were cheap! These are the pointless thoughts I turned over as I walked home.
I squeezed my way through a group of runners who had flocked like seagulls outside a local coffee shop. As I wormed my way through them all, I spotted a good friend. We gave each other a hug and quickly caught up on a variety of topics: our studies, respective writing, events we’d been to, people we’d seen, etc.
We discussed how we had both recently finished the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo. She described how much she loved Rooney’s ability to capture our internal conflicts—how she seems to know us better than we know ourselves. She asked what I thought of the book. I explained that I was never a huge fan of Rooney, having found the adaptation of her novel Normal People too grey and depressing; however, I said that I was pleasantly surprised when I read the novel, especially with aspects of her writing, so I thought I’d give Intermezzo a go. We talked a bit more about the book, said our goodbyes, and I trundled home, still trying to balance the strange selection of food I had acquired.
At home, I dropped all the bags onto the sofa and walked over to my bookshelf to grab my copy of Intermezzo, recalling all the recent conversations I’d had about the novel, watching them blur into one.
A: So, what did you think of Intermezzo?
B: Well, I liked it, I think. There was a lot of really good writing counter-balanced by some not-so-good sections. What about you?
A: I enjoyed it–more than I thought I would.
B: Did you find anything lacking in some of the sections? I just thought there were parts which made me think: ‘that could’ve done with some editing’.
A: I don’t know if I saw that. The differences in how the two main characters’ voices were written I thought, fit with their specific personality traits. Take Peter, whose language is overly intellectual and scattershot, while Ivan has his thoughts narrated in very plain and easy-to-read English. Ivan’s language is simple, because he sees the world in a very direct way.
B: There were moments where I was visibly cringing.
A: You mean during the sex scenes?
B: Sure, let’s use that as an example.
A: Sex can be awkward. I thought Rooney wrote the sex scenes in a way that actually did justice to the story. Although the writing could be jarring at times, people do say odd things during or about sex.
B: There were several moments for me while Ivan and Margaret were having sex that just made me roll my eyes. Ivan often says something like, ‘That’s nice’. Ick.
A: Big ick.
B: But, I also thought that Ivan and Margaret’s storyline was the best part of the book. It was complex and nuanced enough to keep me wanting to know where their characters would go. If their story had been the whole book, I’d have been happy.
A: I especially liked Margaret’s character. The intricacies around their age gap ground the book in a way that feels both believable and beautifully composed. She’s also the most likeable character by far, but we can talk about that later.
B: I read someone say in a review that ‘Ivan and Margaret only occasionally discuss their age gap throughout the novel with each conversation ending in sex, the issue shrugged off and forgotten.’ I didn’t agree. The societal intricacies and the views of other people in Margaret’s life are central to her characters motives and choices. A lot of the time their conversations do eventuate in sex, but in a strange way, I thought Rooney achieved this really well. By having certain conversations eventuate in sex, the characters are briefly relieved from the constant plague of questions they have, and christ do they have some questions. Through intimacy, they are able to lean into themselves in a way. Sex is a play - or a move - that the characters make throughout the novel, which keeps the book engaging as it can lead down some strange, some enlightening, and some truly unpleasant avenues.
A: That brings us to Peter.
B: Christ… I need to preface by saying I really enjoyed about two-thirds of this book, but I found Peter not only reprehensible but also a hard character to believe in. He takes up so much of the book and yet seems to be the most hollow and hazy of all these individuals.
A: It’s not just that this 33-year-old man, severely depressed and having an emotional relationship with one woman and a sexual relationship with another, is simply an asshole—which he is—but that we’re forced into his story so often that his motives become unbelievable.
B: Where I could understand the complexities of Ivan and Margaret’s situation, I struggled to remotely connect to Peter. Rooney’s Joycean, internal stream-of-consciousness monologue for him was actually beautifully done. She captures what makes that style interesting and reconstructs it in a way that’s quite readable—though I do love a bit of Joyce.
A: I’ll never understand.
B: I just didn’t believe in Peter as a character. His motives and arc are solely based on his conflict between love and sex as a single entity. You can’t have one without the other, and because of this, he spirals and believes his life has become forfeit. So much of that friction ends with his constant consideration of suicide. I just don’t think men think think like that. I read a review saying, ‘I find it somewhat difficult to sympathise with the predicament of a man who is driven to the verge of suicide by the prospect of his current and former girlfriends banding together to satisfy his emotional and sexual needs.’ The result of Peter’s situation feels cheap and does an injustice to the women populating his life.
A: I really hated this part of the book as well. The way Naomi (Peter’s much younger girlfriend and sexual ‘toy’) and Sylvia (his ex, who broke up with him after an accident that destroyed her ability to have ‘penetrative’ sex) are both written as objects and devices to steer Peter’s mental decline felt gross. Naomi is given almost no character development or voice; I think she is the only character denied any internal insight in the book. She merely serves as someone who provides sexual relief for Peter. Sylvia, on the other hand, is blamed for much of Peter’s mental decline. Her revelation toward the end of the novel that her inability to have sex has not only affected Peter’s mental state but might be the cause of it is really disturbing. Especially because she feels the need to apologise to him, leaving you with the unpleasant idea that it’s the woman’s fault if the man is sexually frustrated. These characters have no agency of their own, and that felt lazy.
B: And what about the resolution of these three ‘lovers’?
A: The idea that the two women meet, become quick friends, and decide to be a throuple just to satisfy Peter’s sexually repressed, grief-stricken self? It reduces them to ornaments for Peter. They gain nothing; they’re just there to meet his needs.
B: I could forgive Peter’s grief over his father’s death—which is integral to the book but sidelined about midway—but the ending felt too neat and disagreeable. For a book titled after an unexpected move, I was hoping the story would go in several other directions.
A: Speaking of the father’s death, what did you think of Ivan and Peter’s relationship?
B: I thought this was one of the more keenly observed relationships in the book. Especially in retrospect, thinking about my own relationship with my brother and how you can so easily be at loggerheads with each other. For a book that is over four hundred pages long, I would have liked Rooney to give a bit more time to the brother’s relationship, but I do think she caught the way small slights and remarks between siblings can cause deep emotions to rise up, even if those slights are said out of protectiveness or familial love.
A: I wish there had been more of this. It frustrated me that the last 50 or so pages focused on Peter’s resolution, in his voice and mind. It was nice that Peter and Margaret met and that Ivan and Peter resolved their differences, realising they were more similar than they thought, but it left me with more questions. I wished it kept going a bit longer.
B: The book only starts to feel like it is coming alive just as it ends. Not a huge amount happens for quite a long book, especially in comparison to something like Normal People.
A: Doesn’t the pull-quote from Margaret on the back say, ‘More life, more and more of life’? It felt like the book posed more and more questions without clear delineation between what Rooney was asking the reader to consider and what she was getting at.
B: That’s life innit?
A: Stop being silly. We are having a serious conversation here.
B: The book throw an almost unruly amount of open ended questions at you with very little in the way of answers. From questions about religion, to considerations on Wittgenstein’s ideas, all the way to chess theory. The sheer number of these can sometimes bog down what is a very simple - but nonetheless intriguing and generally well-written - story.
A: At one point, Ivan simply ‘begins without further consideration to play a game of chess’. Rooney’s writing is like the mind breaking open onto the page, spilling all of her highly intellectual choices and mistakes without any further consideration. There were numerous quotes that are pulled from Joyce or Eliot or any of the other writers she admires. These are then all referenced in the acknowledgments. That’s all part of Rooney’s intellectual game. As a writer, she bursts onto the page like a flood, with all the mess that comes with it.
B: I think that’s a pretty good way to sum it up.
A: I try. Anything you think she should’ve changed? I thought her portrayal of men was pretty close.
B: I thought she got close, with a few small misfires. Men—not that I speak for all men by any means—are often much simpler than she makes them out to be. Sometimes we consider deeper intellectual ideas, and sometimes we don’t. I think the way she describes men’s views on sex and women was, unfortunately, quite accurate in parts. But I do believe men view relationships as deeper than just a constant preoccupation with sex. I also think she believes a man’s mind is always capable of turning over questions and ideas. If I had one suggestion, it would be to add, at some point, ‘And Ivan thought about nothing. His head was empty. There was nothing going on at all.’
A: That’s definitely true.
B: Hey now.
A: Saying that wouldn’t make for an interesting book, though, so we can forgive her that. It’s funny, in Peter’s words: ‘everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising.’ For a writer as advertised as she is, the Rooney sphere is like a self-contained cycle where beautiful writing gets recycled to examine young relationships—normally heterosexual ones—from only a slightly different angle. I mean, it’s made her incredibly successful, so all power to her.
B: In the end, the book is successful enough that we’re discussing it like this. I enjoyed most of it, despite reservations and dislikes. I don’t usually go for young adult fiction in literary disguise, but her writing balances that line between low and high art, always feeling readable. She’s clearly talented—hard to argue with that—even if I’m not as Rooney’d out as some are by now.
A: And there we are.
B: As Rooney says: ‘It doesn't always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.’
It may seem unsurprising, but we all carry far more than we are capable of, as hard as we try not to. Sally Rooney paints characters that always hold at bay the ever-revolving universe of opinions, thoughts, and concerns that each individual is plagued by. Intermezzo’s recapitulation of the same tortured young protagonist may seem cheap and easy at times, but Rooney sometimes reaches a point of insight that illuminates how we search for connection in this - as she would put it - beautiful world.
Our relationships - in our life and in the lives of Intermezzo’s characters - are defined by transactions: either an equal or unequal arrangement that moulds how we connect to others. The older I get (and I like to think I am still young) the clearer it becomes that our ability to converse with each other is one of the great dividers that can either bring us together or prevent us from loving and being loved.
Normally, when I wake up—rarely with my alarm—I slip out of bed quietly and make a pot of coffee in the kitchen. The light barely reaches the living room windows, and I stand there silently, listening to some aimless podcast on a topic I have little to no understanding of. I pour a cup for myself, and then one for my partner. I walk into the bedroom, where my partner is often still asleep. If she’s awake, I sit down, and we talk as if there is someone else in the room: quietly and warmly. We talk about anything. Bird sounds. What’s making those frustrating construction noises. Our dreams. How I accidentally elbowed her while I was asleep the night before. What we need to do today. What we want for dinner (“what I want for dinner”. It’s too early to even think about that, she says). What we hope to achieve in this all too small a day. Most times, we just sit and talk aimlessly. It feels like everything life is meant to be.
