Intermezzo

(by Sally Rooney)

I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a book about a pair of brothers (who are ten years apart in age and not particularly close to one another) whose father has just died; family dramas are not always my thing. But it’s Sally Rooney, so added to the family drama we have romantic entanglements, with a side of anxiety and neurosis. Around page 314 of 448 I found myself getting extremely grumpy with the hang-ups of Peter, the elder brother, who feels he needs to choose between Sylvia (his ex, whom he still loves—she broke up with him after she was badly injured in an accident because she didn’t want him to wind up resenting her for her/their new reality) and Naomi (his younger girlfriend, who was supposed to be just a casual fling until they both caught feelings). Dude: if you love two people and they both love you and they are both good with you having a relationship with both of them, why would you not try? But then around page 430 or so I felt like all the characters redeemed themselves, and there I was sitting on my couch in tears as I read the last eighteen pages. I like that this book is ultimately hopeful, about love and about life; I like that it ends with a sense of possibility.

I see that this book’s prose style has been, um, divisive, but the use of quotation (from Shakespeare, from Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Joyce, and more) and the nod to a Joycean or Woolfian stream of consciousness worked for me. And, as always, I am a sucker for list-like descriptions of cityscapes and other landscapes. I mean, I love this kind of thing, from a passage about Peter’s commute one day: “Wide grey streets around the Green, buses slowing to a stop, wheel and cry of gulls overhead. Leaves rustle over the park gates. Barred windows of Ship Street then and the vans reversing. Blue clearing in the white clouds, rain-washed cobbles. River dissected by the glitter of sunlight, Grattan Bridge. Copper stepped saucer dome over Portland stone balustraded parapet, dirty green cap in daylight, the Four Courts.”

At times the book’s structure felt a little too schematic to me—Peter is dating a younger woman; his younger brother Ivan is dating an older woman; both Peter and the older woman, Margaret, are anxious about how others will perceive them due to their relationships and fear the “disorder” or “disarray” that these relationships might be bringing to their lives—but ultimately there was more I liked in this book than not.