A review by sarahmatthews
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

medium-paced

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Read on audio

Narrator: Eanna Hardwick 

Pub. 2024, 442pp

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I went into this book so happy to be reading Sally Rooney’s beautiful, often experimental writing and was left conflicted.

The novel is about brothers, Ivan, 22, and Peter, 32, who’re grieving their father’s recent death, exploring how they struggle to navigate this new world. Rooney’s characters are always flawed and introspective, and I so enjoy getting into their heads. Ivan, a chess champion, is dating an older woman he met at a tournament and Peter’s dating someone Ivan’s age and has an ex he’s still close to, and the story revolves around their relationships in a similar way to Rooney’s previous books. 

The brothers have a complex, often antagonistic relationship. In one scene when they meet for dinner, there’s a rare moment where they talk about romantic relationships and their uncertainty about what best to do on a practical level with the family home and Ivan’s beloved dog:

“Ivan is nodding his head, sensing for the first time in his life Peter is speaking to him as an equal, someone who understands the complexities of life and intimate relationships, which, he thinks, is exactly what he is. Someone who has come to understand those complexities for himself.

There are a lot of feelings there, Peter says, and Ivan knows exactly what he means. With Margaret when she cried and he was holding her there were a lot of feelings then, too many. To think of his brother and Sylvia in a similar situation strikes Ivan as strange and sad, although why it should be so sad he doesn’t know exactly. He wants strongly to communicate all this, somehow, how much he understands, how similar he feels, in a way, their circumstances are, and, looking down at his own menu, almost unconsciously affecting the same manner as Peter, he says 

I get you”

But moments of connection like this are fleeting between these brothers, who seem to come together and then clash spectacularly, because they have a shared history of conflict as siblings and know how to hurt each other. Despite their often rather unreasonable behaviour I found myself invested in them and caring about what happened to them; Rooney has a talent for expressing the messiness of life.

I hoped the issue of disability was going to be well depicted here when I realised a character lives with chronic pain, and though my own experience is very different from Sylvia’s, the way she describes the struggle to accept her new circumstances was very relatable and rang true.

I thought we were in good hands because, as far as I can remember, Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, covered pain pretty well when Frances finds she has endometriosis, but about halfway through this one it started to bother me and I wasn’t entirely sure why. Yes, the boyfriend has some awful opinions but as we know, the non-disabled general public find it incredibly hard to understand a fluctuating condition like pain, and Peter’s in a mental health crisis, so it wasn’t necessarily that. But I increasingly found Sylvia’s part of the storyline a turn off as it progressed. I think we needed to understand more about Sylvia’s past as her condition was never properly explained and it appears she wouldn’t be intimate with Peter more for reasons of shame that she’s not as physically active as she was at 22 than because she’s not able to have sex at all. I was left disappointed by this element of the book. Sylvia’s life is seen as tragic due to her disability; needing to rely on Peter but also pushing him away. It’s a complex issue which, in my view, was not sensitively explored.

Overall this was a good read, and the audio narration was flawless, but if you’re at the start of your journey with chronic pain I’d think twice about picking it up.