I admire Intermezzo almost without reservation ... Anyone who has read Rooney’s previous work...is aware that her primary subject is love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it. She writes as well about this topic as anyone alive ... Wise, resonant, and witty ... There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea ... A mature, sophisticated weeper. It makes a lot of feelings begin to slide around in you ... Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading ... This book charmed and moved me.
We’re thrust into a rhythmically fragmented voice, more critical and self-assured but no less elegant. In fact, everything about this novel — its style, theme, length — shows less ruthless restraint than Rooney’s previous books. Poetry and emotion overspill their containers ... There’s something brilliant and refreshing in Rooney’s choice to follow the private love affairs of two siblings once so closely connected ... A story set in the immediate aftermath of loss throws her melancholic, inhibited characters into such high relief.
Not her best work...though it is a marked improvement on Beautiful World, whose experiments with autofiction can feel dull and moralistic in the way that autofiction so often does ... A pleasant return to form: the free indirect style at which Rooney generally excels ... The drama is largely relational ... She is refusing to see the novel as an abstract quantity. She is insisting that it is a relationship between people. This may strike you as a surprisingly rosy account of mass consumption under capitalism, especially from a critic who keeps quoting Karl Marx. And it’s true: The fact that love consists of nothing but real relations between real people who all inhabit the same real world means that love, for a person or for a novel, will never be an escape from conventions or a relief from power. But this fact about love, what we might call its demoralizing specificity, is also the best evidence we have that love exists
Hovering over the book are the language-games of Wittgenstein ... Intermezzo’s characters are sturdy enough to embody these Platonic paradoxes, their real-life situations complex enough to evade them ... I have my quibbles with Rooney’s style. I often crave an outburst, a Brontë-like rupture in the cool self-control that extends like a frost throughout her novels, governing characters and sentences alike. I wonder, too, if the proliferation of binaries taxes the novel’s focus. Still, I cannot help but admire Rooney the storyteller, willing to toe that tricky line between the pleasure-read and philosophy, determined to choose cooperation over cynicism.
Rooney has achieved a neat trick: She is considered the trendiest of novelists, though she writes in a traditional comic form: marriage-plot novels for the postmarriage world, in which the interactions among everyday people are carefully observed and represented—and in which characters are preoccupied by politics, technology, morality, sex, death, art and God.
Give Sally Rooney credit for not sticking with a safe formula ... This is new and deeper territory for Rooney ... The work of an artist who is continually trying out new techniques and continually growing.
The melodrama is perhaps the point ... Rooney seems prepared to grant her characters a slightly off-kilter yet still harmonious ending, this time against a backdrop of personal grief and family strife ... The way she supplies tidy closure, even as she subverts it, is a testament to her skill as a novelist.
Rooney’s scope has expanded. She’s moved from the tight familiarity and steady pacing of her earlier novels to a larger narrative scale as her characters age and their worlds grow more complex, with bigger casts and slower pacing. Estrangement, as much as desire, is the overwhelming human condition in the book. Her characters lack mobility. The reader feels it as well ... Rooney skillfully keeps her finger on the pulse of characters ... Studded with shimmering moments of pastoral stillness that offer an alternative to life on an urban career track or a conventional path to domestic bliss, but there’s an overwhelming air of resigned doom in this novel ... Though Rooney is one of our most earnest and passionate contemporary writers, one hopes that this saga framed by lust and grief is an interlude between great acts.
Rooney's most somber ... Feels baggy and sometimes repetitive. Yet this bagginess allows Rooney to show how power operates not only within but also between relationships, as she follows the interplay of romantic and familial ties in the wake of grief and loss ... The compulsive quality of Rooney’s earlier works, which can be read in a day or two, has as much to do with the clarity and attentiveness of her style as with the on-again, off-again plots they narrate ... The result is a work that’s less coherent, and less purely enjoyable, than her others—but one that hints at an author working her way to something new.
Has the form but not the content of a novel of ideas ... Each character has been flattened like the butter on the bread they incessantly eat, turned into a blandly satisfying fantasy of good humour, essentially good motives and good old romance ... While Intermezzo also presents as a novel about 'grief', the brothers’ father having recently died, he is sketched so vaguely that we must content ourselves with bland and unaffecting sentiment ... It would seem that mainstream publishing wishes to gain the credibility of allusion to the more sullied aspects of contemporary life without depicting anything unsavoury.
Most accomplished novel yet ... The author’s literary finesse grows with each new novel. I understand there may be valid counterpoints to the presentation of cultural and political opinions in this book, but to my mind, each of her successive books is an expansive exploration rather than an outright manifesto.
It’s half a good book, Margaret and Ivan. But it’s half a tedious novel made from the partially rearranged remnants of other Rooney outings. There’s even a moment when they decamp from Dublin to the dead father’s house in Kildare! She loves doing that! One is very much aware of the clicking of the wheels when reading this novel. Enjoyable. Pleasurable. But it is not a seamless experience. I know it’s rather boring of me to say so, but I do wish the book had more polish, and that she had concealed her work a little more.
Rooney has long structured her novels around relationships and their capacity to remake us for the better. Conversation and sex are not just pastimes but engines of epiphany, and her characters are most pliable in these intimate moments ... Love, grief, shame: These are not just Intermezzo’s thematic preoccupations but the substance of most of its talk. And as in any Rooney novel, there is a lot of talk. While in her previous work much of this talk was explicitly political—discussions about empire and feminism, the exploitation that undergirds Western convenience, and whether or not beauty died with the demise of the Soviet Union—in Intermezzo her characters are focused more narrowly on their own moral and emotional quandaries ... This tendency toward action is in some ways refreshing: Rooney’s previous novels were often criticized for the way her characters spent almost all of their time hand-wringing over the gap between their passion for equality, justice, and redistributive economic policies and their comfortable bourgeois lives. In Intermezzo, this dilemma is mostly put to the side, and instead we get characters acting out their political commitments while struggling to make sense of their personal lives. Yet at the level of conversation, the inward turn of Rooney’s protagonists can at times feel claustrophobic, their intense focus on themselves and their lovers excessively recursive. Instead of spinning out into the world, Rooney’s characters end up trapped even more inside their own heads ... Whether love can materially challenge the capitalist order is still an open question, but whether it can create a more equal society among friends and family is, at least in the novel, optimistically confirmed.
[Rooney] has made it clear with each succeeding book that she is no flash in the pan. Intermezzo, her fourth novel, is her most fully developed and moving yet ... The ever-resonant conversations, often about delicate subjects, are still alternately soul-baring and couched, plaintive and meandering. The sex scenes — physical expressions of her characters' emotional communions — are as beautiful as ever. But Intermezzo is focused less on topical questions about how to live in a troubled, increasingly unviable world and more on the psychological ramifications of love, loss and heartache ... propels you to its well-earned, moving climax with nary a false move.
Though at times it falls short of its ambitions, Intermezzo reaffirms Rooney’s ability to capture the thrill and desperation of blooming romance, and to portray a microcosm of human existence with precision and insight.
It is a testament to Rooney’s considerable talent that in novel after novel her characters also feel very real to us and linger long after we close the book
Towering ... Her prose has always been sparse but in Peter’s chapters it is so plucked to the bone she forgoes words entirely ... Philosophical ... While this is undoubtedly Rooney’s darkest novel to date, there is also lightness to hold on to ... a book to be read slowly. Do so, and it is worth the effort. Mature and profound, Intermezzo feels like a culmination of everything she has done before.
Not exactly her best, nor likely to be her best loved ... But if Intermezzo is not Rooney’s juiciest novel, it is her meatiest ... 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 ... The new structure of feeling – tender, sombre – is especially evident in the sex ... What makes Intermezzo better than its predecessors is what makes it more imperfect: it is Rooney’s most wholehearted novel but also her most sentimental; her most uninhibited but not her most compulsive; her most likeable but not her coolest; her most highbrow but not her most accomplished ... Not a stylish book ... Rooney has tried to deepen her fiction, and has thrown herself at her task with enough conviction and skill to exorcise the initial self-consciousness that accompanies so conspicuous a departure. In doing so, she earns the liberties she takes.
Her gifts are clear: writing realistic dialogue and creating believable characters; narrative economy and instinctive pacing; capturing the way we live as it moves and changes; depicting emotion. She has a particularly deft sense of the writer’s role in a political landscape ... It isn’t gorgeous to read ... Rooney’s novels stand for the notion that ordinary people should also be allowed the tumults and comforts of an emotional life, along with a sense that their existence is important because it is precious to the people they love. This, it seems to me, is one of the ideas underlying communism.
Exquisite ... Works beautifully ... It’s as tender and lovely as you could ask for, and beneath the elegant rise and fall of Rooney’s oceanic sentences, the waters go deep.
For all her dazzling virtues as a psychologist and an observer of emotional life, Rooney’s artistic curiosity is unavoidably limited ... In the past, the narrowness of Rooney’s fictional world was also the source of its intensity ... Intermezzo, however, deals with characters in their thirties, and the novel’s insistence on a mood of ethical and intellectual refinement can feel claustrophobic and precious ... Such moral ambiguity as the novel can bring itself to contain is dispiritingly slight, and often takes place safely off stage ... Can seem prissy ... At its best her writing is distinguished by its deadpan ironies and subtle responsiveness to the intonations of 21st-century speech ... Where she once sounded modern, Rooney elects to sound mannered and wilfully archaic ... For all its flaws, Intermezzo is scattered with the little gifts of psychological and emotional observation that are the most cherishable aspects of Rooney’s talent.
On finishing, I reflected: what would it be to hold a book with a soul? I felt I had. I felt changed, and utterly the same ... I had gone more deeply into the world, reattuned to its networked thrum of pleasures, miseries, worries, and erotics that I might already have been aware of – but dully. Sublime literature will do this for you.
Intermezzo is perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements ... What makes Rooney so electrically compelling is the way she sticks with a scene and draws it out ... Is there a better novelist at work right now?
An accomplished continuation of the writing that made Rooney a global phenomenon. It’s also more philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger ... My instinct while reading is to throw open a window, look at a painting, anything to allay the claustrophobia induced by being kept so close to people absorbed exclusively by their feelings, right now this moment, for each other. But art does its job when it pulls us beyond our instincts to experience other ways of being. Intermezzo is itself about life as continuous experiment. The novel suggests that Rooney...won’t be settling in the shapes she has established, but holding us, with mixed joy and unease, in strenuous irresolution.
Intermezzo sees Rooney return to exceptional form with a novel as clever as...Conversations with Friends, and as engrossing as...Normal People ... Nothing much else happens. And yet what Rooney offers instead is enough: characters rendered in a kind of literary pointillism, interiorities that feel so real they vibrate, inwardness turned utterly out. In Intermezzo, her usually spare style meets something more impressionistic ... If there’s weakness to the novel, it may be in the depiction of the subsidiary female characters ... Rooney points us to something deeper about the nature of relationships.
One of the strange things about this book is the degree to which it lacks a female perspective. One can only assume that this is deliberate. Perhaps the idea is to show how flatly the men, particularly Peter, see the women in their lives, how unable they are to process them in three dimensions — but if so, it doesn’t fully work ... The chess theme sits on a knife-edge between being well-observed and being, well, a bit much ... This book feels a bit too long ... It is perfectly readable and entertaining.
tight focus on the siblings allows Rooney to delve into ideas about birth order and masculinity, while the careful balance between the novel’s brisk pace and its quite fearless exploration of sexual desire makes Intermezzo Rooney’s most ambitious novel yet.
As with all of Rooney's books, this is a character-driven novel and these two are fantastically well-drawn, as are those on the periphery of the two men's lives. Dialogue is her particularly strength and conversations are like well-orchestrated dances, leaping and pirouetting across the page. There are moments of real poignancy and the two men's hurt and grief, close to the surface, is often painful to read ... this feels like a more mature novel - and in my opinion, her best yet. There's more introspection here, more vulnerability from the characters, and this allows a greater connection. Rooney’s writing can be Marmite, but if you love introspective, meandering novels that weave in thoughts on everything from the Dublin housing crisis to modern masculinity, Intermezzo - tender and true - is for you.
Seems to me a deeply millennial novel, in that it’s suffused not just with the concerns of her previous books, but also with an elegiac awareness of how we eventually stop being young ... Rooney’s style is often misunderstood ... Rooney has, for swathes of this novel, made a consistent attempt to change her style. She tends to write declarative sentences, rarely front-loaded with subordinate clauses or borne down by descriptive flourishes. Here, to conjure psychological turmoil, she cuts the verbs, shortens the sentences ... Rooney’s prose has the same virtues as ever. She has an easy way with normality ... At the heart of Rooney’s characterisation is a quality that can pull both ways: her fondness for brilliance. It’s engrossing and impressive, mostly – until it tips into a flaw.
The trouble is, I don’t actually want to laugh at Rooney. To continue to list Intermezzo’s silly bits would be to belie the experience of reading it. This is a novel I always wanted to return to, a novel that worked on me like a self-help book and left me feeling I might have a stab at being a better person, at practising a spot of kindness and gratitude. It’s a romantic novel, a motivational, wish-fulfilment novel. The emotive ending provides a level of gratification that borders on the downright cheesy. In short, Intermezzo feels like a guilty pleasure. There is a wider than usual gulf between the writer Rooney wants to be and the writer she actually is. She identifies with 19th-century realism, yet practices a soft-core literary idealism ... Rooney is marketed as an intellectual, and a serious literary novelist, and her novels display the trappings of literary seriousness...In fact, Rooney writes simple, heart-warming moral tales full of sex. She has yet to tackle the complex mundanity of a longterm relationship. All of her narratives depict nascent romances or on-off relationships plagued by misunderstanding. If you approach her work expecting high literature, you are bound to be disappointed, even scornful. But if you put on the kettle and cosy up for an old-fashioned love story, then you might just find yourself having a good time.
Intermezzo’s characters feel familiar because we’ve seen them before; they are the archetypes to which Rooney has made men and women reducible. But they also feel familiar, alarmingly so, despite all their talk of climate change and social justice, because they are almost indistinguishable from the chads and trad wives of our particularly gender-troubled moment, as well as from generations of men and women bound to each other by the idea that it all works out in the end as long as the woman submits. Feminists fought hard against that notion, but its simplicity seems too tempting. I can forgive it in the scores of people who see no other way out, but it’s harder to swallow from a novelist whose work has at times been interpreted as social critique. The lives of entire generations of people have been made temporarily bearable and then, ultimately, hallucinatorily tragic by their acceptance of the same premise on which Intermezzo’s placid ending rests: that men exist at the mercy of the world—and that women exist at the mercy of men.
...a portrait of grief not fully internalized. In her astutely intimate style, Rooney wades through the convoluted emotions that follow tragedy: certainly heartache, but also relief and longing, guilt and joy, all on the cusp of transformation ... Intermezzo, an unexpected move in chess that interrupts the typical sequence of exchanges, is a risk that upends the game’s perceived balance, raising the stakes. In the tense, messy contradictions of communal grief, Rooney weaves together beautiful whole cloth.
Rooney’s fourth novel might be her best yet: a tale of depth and grand sweep, an understated study of characters caught circling the margin of some great and unknown thing, and a diversion of pure enjoyment, too. Rooney’s title tells us these brothers, in their love and fury for one another, are at an in-between moment, as she carefully, brilliantly writes them out of it.
Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement ... Even the author’s skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel’s forceful currents of feeling.
Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real. Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
