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dark
emotional
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Moderate: Cancer, Drug abuse, Drug use, Suicidal thoughts, Death of parent
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug abuse, Suicidal thoughts, Grief, Alcohol
Moderate: Cancer, Sexual content, Death of parent
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Really disliked the staccato, stream of consciousness writing style in Peter’s chapters. They had an almost Yoda-like sentence structure that was hard to connect to.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicidal thoughts, Grief, Death of parent
Moderate: Chronic illness, Drug abuse, Violence
Minor: Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Cancer
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Chronic illness, Suicidal thoughts, Grief, Death of parent
Moderate: Drug abuse
Minor: Vomit
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
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Happy fall, babes — Sally has come to crack our chests wide open once again.
Sally Rooney writes the kind of literary fiction that I love best: Novels with vivid, flawed characters that walk off the page and into your heart forever. Novels where the relationship between the characters is the entire point and plot, so you feel like you could happily read 100 more pages. (A few other books that give me this feeling are The Most Fun We Ever Had and Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow.)
Here, in Intermezzo, that skill is sharper than ever. The story centers on two brothers whose father recently passed away from cancer. Peter is a lawyer and adjunct professor in his 30s whose heart is torn between a spirited woman in her early 20s and his ex, who broke things off when an accident caused lifelong chronic pain but remains his best friend. Ivan is a chess whiz in his 20s who falls in love with a lovely, older, effectively divorced woman. The two of them come together and push apart, hurting each other and the women in their lives accidentally (and sometimes on purpose) again and again.
Rooney makes all of this conflict feel especially acute by alternating between sharp, devastating dialogue and taut, spiraling inner monologue. Ivan’s chapters are traditionally constructed, while Peter’s are fragmented and run-on and read like something closer to stream of consciousness. It comes together as a deeply effective look at grief, family dynamics, and (as always for Sally) the complicated nature of love and desire.
I could have kept reading this book forever, and it reminded me how badly I need to go back and finish Sally’s backlist.
Thank you, FSG, for the honor to read an early copy of this book!
Happy fall, babes — Sally has come to crack our chests wide open once again.
Sally Rooney writes the kind of literary fiction that I love best: Novels with vivid, flawed characters that walk off the page and into your heart forever. Novels where the relationship between the characters is the entire point and plot, so you feel like you could happily read 100 more pages. (A few other books that give me this feeling are The Most Fun We Ever Had and Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow.)
Here, in Intermezzo, that skill is sharper than ever. The story centers on two brothers whose father recently passed away from cancer. Peter is a lawyer and adjunct professor in his 30s whose heart is torn between a spirited woman in her early 20s and his ex, who broke things off when an accident caused lifelong chronic pain but remains his best friend. Ivan is a chess whiz in his 20s who falls in love with a lovely, older, effectively divorced woman. The two of them come together and push apart, hurting each other and the women in their lives accidentally (and sometimes on purpose) again and again.
Rooney makes all of this conflict feel especially acute by alternating between sharp, devastating dialogue and taut, spiraling inner monologue. Ivan’s chapters are traditionally constructed, while Peter’s are fragmented and run-on and read like something closer to stream of consciousness. It comes together as a deeply effective look at grief, family dynamics, and (as always for Sally) the complicated nature of love and desire.
I could have kept reading this book forever, and it reminded me how badly I need to go back and finish Sally’s backlist.
Thank you, FSG, for the honor to read an early copy of this book!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicidal thoughts, Grief, Death of parent
Moderate: Chronic illness, Drug abuse, Sexual content, Alcohol
challenging
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Moderate: Violence
Minor: Addiction, Drug abuse, Vomit, Alcohol
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Suicidal thoughts
Moderate: Drug abuse
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
7 Cents July 26 2024: Totally Normal People
1. Is Sally Rooney having me on? Maybe she's mad that I ditched her last novel halfway through, on page 225 out of 350.
2. For Intermezzo (out in September '24), Rooney adopts and adapts James Joyce's fractured sentences when inside her protagonists' heads.
3. To make a point. Yes. But also because it works, clever. And bring in that language philosopher: Ludwig Witts-his-name. But does it connect? Or not, like those neon circles not really. Brain makes the circle.
4. I also noticed some Hamlet bits, because I just watched Julia Stiles and Kyle MacLachlan in the great and bonkers 2000 Hamlet. Ethan Hawke wonders whether to be or not while pacing through a Blockbuster. Also, Rooney meantioned it in her notes.
5. Ulysses, on the other hand, I hadn't read since lockdown. As Rooney mentioned in her nice 2022 Paris Review piece, Ulysses is about a couple of guys.
6. And so is Intermezzo. There's a third protagonist, Margaret, whose interior we sometimes feel. But mostly, when it comes to internal focalization, free indirect discourse, feelings: It's about these two brothers.
7. And it's great. But maybe that's exactly what Rooney wants me to say! I won't fall for it! Does she think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? I hate it when she does that.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Drug abuse, Drug use, Infertility, Alcohol
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Thanks to FSG Books for the free copy of this book.
- INTERMEZZO is Sally Rooney’s most ambitious work yet. It digs deep into the lives of four complicated, messy people who all to some degree have no idea what they are doing.
- Rooney is so good at keeping the reader engaged even when “nothing” is happening. Long conversations, extended mental monologues. When something does happen in this book, it’s often a character making a bad, barely defensible choice. And yet, I was compelled to keep reading.
- One of the central pieces of this book is ableism, both external and internal. Ivan doesn’t have an on-page diagnosis but he reads autistic to me, and Sylvia has chronic pain following an accident. Much of the emotional turmoil of the story centers on the characters’ feelings about it all. It’s a lot to chew on, and I’m still turning it all over in my head.
- INTERMEZZO is Sally Rooney’s most ambitious work yet. It digs deep into the lives of four complicated, messy people who all to some degree have no idea what they are doing.
- Rooney is so good at keeping the reader engaged even when “nothing” is happening. Long conversations, extended mental monologues. When something does happen in this book, it’s often a character making a bad, barely defensible choice. And yet, I was compelled to keep reading.
- One of the central pieces of this book is ableism, both external and internal. Ivan doesn’t have an on-page diagnosis but he reads autistic to me, and Sylvia has chronic pain following an accident. Much of the emotional turmoil of the story centers on the characters’ feelings about it all. It’s a lot to chew on, and I’m still turning it all over in my head.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Chronic illness, Cursing, Drug abuse, Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, Grief, Death of parent, Alcohol
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Peter and Ivan—brothers, a decade apart—have just lost their father to cancer. Once close, now semi-estranged, they grieve independently. Peter a confident human rights lawyer and a miserable coward, self-medicating while juggling loves old and new. Ivan, the younger (whom I read as autistic), a chess player of missed potential, intense, tender, and in love for the first time. Intimate and erotic, the brothers’ stories unfold amid themes of philosophy. Intermezzo leaves one wondering—optimistically—what really matters, in the grand scheme of things. Sally Rooney is among my favorite living writers.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, Grief
Moderate: Chronic illness, Alcohol
Minor: Addiction, Alcoholism, Drug abuse, Drug use, Terminal illness, Violence, Vomit, Police brutality, Medical content, Death of parent