A review by keegan_leech
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

challenging emotional reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Sally Rooney   seems to have this ability to entangle and blend together emotions like no one else. It's as though she writes "run-on feelings" which flow into one another and can't be picked apart afterwards. Individual emotional phrases might be simple, in some cases almost cliché, but in a torrent of other emotions, the overall sense is of something more complex and true-to-life.

Haven't we all at some point felt that our emotional turmoil is entirely unique to ourselves, and also that Joni Mitchell has conveniently written it down in words and turned it into a massive international hit? Rooney's writing, in my experience, evokes that same sense of experiencing something simultaneously deeply personal and infinitely relatable. I constantly vacillate when reading her work between "These feelings must be universal, surely everyone has felt this way," and "I never knew this feeling could be described, I never thought anyone else felt like this". Really, it isn't even what her characters feel that makes Rooney's writing so familiar, but the way they feel. They're bundles of a million incompatible impulses and desires, mundane and pretentious and self-destructive and transcendent all at once. (Just like me and you!)

This kind of emotional emulsification of confusing and contradictory feelings is in a broader sense how Rooney treats all human relationships.  Intermezzo captures this particularly well; one passage, which might as well be the novel's thesis statement, reads:

Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting. There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgement, reproval, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another.

I find that a moving sentiment, and Intermezzo expresses it far better than I ever could. So go read the book! Entangle yourself in the emotions of others, in life itself.

All the usual impact of Rooney's writing aside, this novel affected me very deeply. I don't know if it was something about myself or my life, if I was just especially receptive to it at the time I picked it up, or if this is just Rooney's best work yet and this is what everyone else must feel too. Whatever the case, it did something to me and I find it impossible to say exactly what. It seems as though the novel has burrowed into me and is rearranging some part of myself that I can't reach. It's going to stay with me a long time, I can tell.

After all my effusive praise for the novel and my own attempts to pick it apart in my head, I find it hard to say why it's felt so personally impactful. Which is not a bad experience, I think.
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