I had good memories of her previous books, but this one was quite boring, I eventually skimmed the last hundred pages. Lots of convoluted drama and angst around two brothers in mirror relationships (the young maybe autistic chess player with the thirty-something divorcée, the thirty-something rich lawyer with the young lost girl and her OF account and his ex from high school).
One thing to note about Rooney's universe is that she doesn't try and hide her upper-middle-class characters in the shroud of normalcy, as it is often done (I mean, it's pretty hard to do when your characters quote Wittgenstein). This assumed setting is also a problem, as the issues and solutions they meet are those of their class: their tormented fight against the so very oppressive norms that attack couples with a 10/15-year gap*, and the obvious solutions -- becoming braver in the hope of making the world more tolerant, opening ourselves to polyamory and hoping for the best, time will tell, etc. To add to the drama (and I suspect, to justify the high emotional volatility of the two brothers), they have just buried their father.
It felt a bit like the "how is cyberbullying a real thing" meme. I couldn't take them seriously, and they looked more like people in search of a justification to suffer than people trying to find a way out of suffering. In that regard, Rooney's characters are very human and quite annoying.
*Some people in the village appear to make comments; one mother is critical. I might have missed other attempts on their fundamental rights while skimming through the end of the book.
intermezzo actually took me about a month to get through because i found it so unpleasant. one of the reasons why normal people worked (in my opinion) was because the "low stakes but feels like life or death" situations rooney presents are very much how it feels to be between 17-22 years old and overly concerned with social acceptance and norms. she doesn't translate these stakes elegantly to the world of supposedly adult world of intermezzo, and i can't imagine a cause i could care less about than the societal acceptance of a 30 some year old man who needs to have sex with an OF girl 10 years his junior. and i use "cause" intentionally because rooney assumes a much more moralizing tone in intermezzo, and caps the already unpleasant experience off with a grating pro-polyamory spiel.
You're right, there is some discrepancy between the ages and their concerns. They do act like old teenagers, very constrained by the worry of knowing which rules to follow and to break. Maybe the real age gap was there all along.
I've read her other books but after the third I realised they are all the same books. Variations on an emotionally distant man trying to navigate a relationship with a liberal and above average intelligence woman with slight tweaks here and there. This seems like Normal People: Polyamory Edition so I think I will pass.
It's true, they're mostly the same. I was ready to ignore it because I remember enjoying the general mood, but this time I was just annoyed. The polyamory bit comes at the end, to be fair, or rather, the ethical part of it lol.
i could not get through 30 pages of this book lol, sounds about as i expected