Intermezzo

lyreplucker

Jan 08, 2025

This was my first Sally Rooney novel.

Although ostensibly about grief, I found the more interesting themes to be about age (differences), masculinity, family, and what people owe to each other.

I’m recording these thoughts a day after having read it, I finished it in the morning and I did think about it all the rest of that day. But here on the second day, I’m kind of at a loss about to say about it… if that is any indication of how it was. I was quite ambivalent the whole way through reading it and remain ambivalent about it, but after having finished it I ended up liking it more than I expected, the too-saccharine end (for my taste) notwithstanding.

I admired the form that she created with it, switching between perspectives and having quite a different writing style between the perspectives, which she used effectively to portray the personalities and thoughts of the main characters.

Maybe I’m just a bit of a rube, but I did find her style of prose hard to read at times and not admirable in an aesthetic sense, especially for Peter‘s sections. I understand what she was going for, I just didn’t really like it. I also don’t like to listen to the music of Stockhausen. It didn’t take me long to begin to be extremely peeved with her descriptions of people conversing. I did like how she writes conversations in a very physical way, but can’t one do that in a wider way than: they’re hot, they’re cold, they’re simultaneously hot and cold ? If you played a drinking game where you took a shot every time a character on some part of their body felt hot or cold during a conversation, you’d be dead within one chapter.

The creation of the characters was very well done, most with a very believable point of view and personality that both play into stereotypes of types of people that I know, and yet still feel like real people and not reductions. She has a way to make the reader be compassionate to flaws in characters, for example with Peter who I found simultaneously contemptible and relatable, and also to characters being an antagonist to other characters’ lives, yet portraying them in a way that isn’t necessarily too simple or reductive, for example with the mother of the brothers. I didn’t mind and actually quite liked that we end up knowing next to nothing about the dead father. I was also impressed with the development of characters depending on whom they were interacting with; I could really sense the burgeoning maturity of Ivan when he’s alone or with Margaret and then see the regression back to a child-state when dealing with Peter.

But I felt it could’ve been tighter: I’m wondering why she wrote the third perspective of Margaret at all, although I could maybe understand because I felt like those sections lived in a way that the other sections in the brothers’ perspectives sometimes didn’t.

I A+2

2 comments

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icarusrising91 year ago

Thanks for sharing! I enjoyed reading your thoughts. So far, I've only read *Normal People* by Rooney, which I really enjoyed, but this book is on my list. Hopefully it's not weird for me to comment my thoughts on Rooney in general having not yet read *Intermezzo*. I feel it's fashionable to hate on Rooney, probably because it's paradoxically so fashionable in the mainstream to overrate her works, but I found what I've read by her to be wonderful. I don't know if that extends to this specific book though, I wish I'd already read it so I could weigh in on it specifically. I do think it's sort of funny you zeroed in specifically on her prose as something you weren't a huge fan of, as I've found that's something reviewers typically praise as strong point of hers, albeit one that I personally find can be a little too mechanistic, risk-averse, and "by the book" for my liking at times. I agree with your take that her character development is very strong, at least from what I saw in *Normal People*. I think that was my favorite aspect of her work, how carefully she built up and developed these characters, flawed and tragic, but you can't help but empathize with their conditions. I thought she also had a lot to say, between the lines, about love and class and the human condition and these sorts of "big picture" questions, in a subtle way I really appreciated. (I'm assuming, based on reviews I've read of *Intermezzo*, that aspect is much the same.) I'd absolutely recommend *Normal People* if you're willing to take a risk on the prose.

lyreplucker1 year ago

Thanks for the comment! I think regarding the prose it might just be a personal taste factor, as well. I found the stream-of-consciousness-ness of Peter's sections to be too staccato for me to really enjoy. I came to this book after a bit of a phase of non-reading and not having finished many books for a while, and the my rustiness in focus probably contributed to my experience, in fact I'm sure it did. I've seen other reactions to the novel comparing these parts to Joyce, and I certainly thought this too while reading it, but (although my familiarity of Joyce is not nearly full enough to really make a competent comparison) I find Joyce's prose has a beauty and lyricism despite the disjointedness, and Rooney's lacked this which made it not very enjoyable to me. But this is probably too unfair a comparison to make in the first place. Thank you for the recommendation! I have read a bit more of the reception to the other novels (having already been passively familiar in both the good and the bad) and it seems like a lot of people's complaints start and stop with the lack of quotation marks, an aspect of Intermezzo that didn't bother me at all. So I think I will pick up Normal People or some other of her previous books sometime in the future.