Aimée Walsh writes: There are few writers whose books do that rare thing of being a cultural event that breaks beyond the literary world. Sally Rooney, whose work has become a (reluctant) emblem for millennial angst or ‘sad girl lit’, is a writer who does just that. Her books span the cleft between commercial fiction and literary fiction; it’s a sharp and narrow gorge, created by publishing professionals, that separates the two genres. But Rooney’s work covers both sides, speaking to whoever needs to hear it. It’s this rejection of the banality of commercialisation of the literary arts that makes Rooney’s Intermezzo a rare jewel.
Marketing is fleeting, but art is not. Intermezzo is a markedly existential novel, one that focuses on life, death, and how we can traverse our material realities under capitalism and the Sisyphean tasks where we clock in, clock out, pay bills. All the while ecosystems are crumbling under the strain of emissions. And people feel lonelier and more disconnected than ever, despite increased ‘connectivity’ through the internet. Intermezzo asks us, the reader: is there another way to live? How can we live a life, when the world is the way it is? In this new novel, Rooney, as is her trademark style, renders the connections between friends and lovers as if the world depends on it, and I should think, it does.
At the time of writing, we are a couple of weeks out from publication and this fourth book’s marketing campaign feels noticeably different. The Co Mayo writer rose to fame with her debut, Conversations with Friends, but it was on her second novel, Normal People, that she became a household name. The TV series, co-written with Alice Birch, hit screens across the world during the first national coronavirus lockdown. It would not be an overstatement to describe the response to the show as a kind of hysteria. With Daisy Edgar-Jones, who acted as Marianne, and Paul Mescal, who played Connell, becoming fixations for what felt like most of the internet. To this day, an Instagram account for ‘Connell Waldron’s Chain’ still has 132,000 followers. After this, the marketing campaign was in overdrive in the run-up to her third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You? Faber gave us branded bucket hats, pop-up shops for merchandise, and a mural in Shoreditch, London.
But for Intermezzo there’s a quietness. There isn’t – at the time of writing at least – a bucket hat in sight. It’s refreshing. Rooney’s work does not need the pageantry of gimmicks. Intermezzo marks the beginning of her career as a writer of ideas, as a novelist for the nation. Much has been written about the novel’s ability to reflect the state of the nation. It comes in waves. Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls did this in 1960s Ireland, and Rooney’s work does it for contemporary Ireland, holding a mirror up to us all, showing us in all our brutality and tenderness. In a crucial crisis moment in the novel, one character, Naomi, and her housemates have their house raided by the gardaí, resulting in her spending a night in the cells. She asks, ‘How many properties do they keep lying vacant anyway, lost count probably, bloodsucking parasites.’ Here we find Rooney as States-woman novelist, reflecting (some of) the horrors of modern life back on to the reader.
The hallmark of Rooney’s writing is exploring the erotic, particularly relationships with age gaps, and female friendships. Intermezzo treads similar ground, with the major departure being a focus on male interpersonal relationships, specifically that between two brothers. Peter and Ivan are grieving the loss of their father. Ten years separate the pair. Peter is working as a human rights lawyer and Ivan is a declining chess genius. The familial connections between the pair are fractured, and so too are their respective romantic relations. At a chess norm – a kind of competition played to advance in rankings –twenty-two-year-old Ivan meets Margaret, fourteen years his senior. And for Peter, he is between two women. The first, Sylvia, is his university sweetheart, who is unable to be intimate with him following an accident. The other, Naomi, is a student who is also a sex-worker to pay her bills, her tuition. For some writers, managing this many crucial relationships may be troubling, too difficult to execute possibly, but Rooney maps each of these relationships as if they are the only one, as if they deserve primacy. And isn’t that true of life, of us all? The very nature of feeling – of love and grief – is both universal and subjective. To hurt or desire is to feel as if you are the first to encounter that particular emotion, and Rooney’s characters embody this paradox between the collective and the individual beautifully.
Intermezzo holds connection in a time of capitalism at its core: that money, to have or to desire it, is akin to ‘greasing with exploitation the wheels of human interaction’. Peter has an ‘irrational attachment to meaning’, where he ‘couldn’t go to work in the morning if he didn’t think something meant something meant something else’. The two, capital and human relationships, are intertwined. But what then of life, if interpersonal bonds are tied up with salaries and bills? Intermezzo tells us we have a responsibility to each other and to the environment and that that is the primary profit and loss we should be concerned with.
Our bodies are sexual entities, boundaried by capitalism in myriad ways. Of Naomi, we are told she has ‘no job, no family support, no fixed address, no state entitlements, no money to finish college. Owner of nothing in the world but her own perfect body.’ The use of the term ownership here is brilliant, forging together possession, the body and capital. Naomi’s body is her marketplace, she utilises it and the sexual desire of others to pay her bills. It is interesting, then, that Peter’s other lover, Sylvia, is unable to have sex due to a traumatic event. The rupture this causes between them is the fracture in their relationship. Consider then life under capitalism, or to reframe it as profit culture, where we are continually driven to a goal of accumulation, of attaining more and more of whatever it is we could want. How can we reconcile love under these parameters? Our needs are not only fulfilled by a single entity, Intermezzo tells us. Peter says, ‘I love you. Her. Both … Christ commands us universally to love one another.’ Rooney takes this inherently Christian belief and applies it to a polycule scenario, a uniquely modern take on love.
This novel has a lot to say about the philosophical interaction between the body and the mind. Bodies are wonderful, but rebellious and ruinous. Sylvia is unable to control the pain of hers. Peter and Ivan’s father is taken by rogue cells which developed into cancer. As Ivan puts it, ‘the body [is] a fundamentally primitive object’ while the mind is ‘capable of supreme rationality’. Capable, yes, but that fulfilment is not guaranteed. The conduit between the mind and the body is language, that which externalises the internal. Of sex, the act of bringing two bodies together, we are told, ‘the intimacy between them felt total and perfect, their ways of knowing one another passing out beyond language’. This is the crux then of Intermezzo, the connection between people – not just sexual, but platonic too – is a kind of magic, a profit that we should all seek to gain. As Ivan puts it, ‘To have met her like this: beautiful, perfect. A life worth living, yes.’
22/9.2024
Aimée Walsh is a writer from Belfast. Her debut novel, Exile, was published in the UK and Ireland in spring 2024.
