From the author of Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You?, a novel a pair of Irish brothers---the older a successful lawyer, the younger an awkward chess prodigy---mourning the recent death of their father, and the women they both become entangled with.
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
