The first thing I noticed about Intermezzo is there are no quotation marks. So the reader is just plunged into an almost stream-of-consciousness-like trance that could work as either inner dialogue or actual dialogue. It was so bewildering to me in the beginning that I had to reread the first few pages to understand what was happening.
After about 10 pages in, my brain got used to it, accepted it, and embraced that stylistic choice — allowing me to tumble headlong into the minds of brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek.
The two appear to be very different — they certainly think the other is completely unlike himself. But one thing they definitely have in common is in their unravelling after the death of their father. Peter, the elder one, is 32 years old, a successful lawyer working in the city, and largely seems to be regarded as handsome, charming, and sociable. But in the days after his father’s funeral, it’s clear that Peter is not doing well. He drinks too much, way too much, medicates himself, and appears to be torturously juggling his relationships with two women — his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, who has remained in his life, and Naomi, a way-too-young-for-him college student who struggles to keep her life stable.
His brother Ivan is a competitive chess player at 22, but otherwise seems a bit at a loss on how to keep his life going when he’s not playing chess. He has always held Peter at arm’s length — regarding him with a bit of awe but also feeling slightly superior to him in terms of intellect — and after their father’s death, the already residual resentment builds from the moment in which his elder brother stood up to give a speech and Ivan was not offered the chance.
During an organized tournament — where Ivan plays chess with a number of people at the same time — he meets Margaret, an older woman — 38, if I remember correctly. He is immediately smitten with her, and they start a tentative relationship. It’s maybe the healthiest one I’ve seen in a book in a while, despite it coming just on the heels of Ivan’s bereavement.
From the outside, it probably seems like Peter has his shit together. He goes to work, he wins cases that get written about in the paper, and he seems to really have the motions of “Put Together Adult” down. But he can’t seem to stop thinking badly of himself for running to Naomi for sex and fun, judging himself for giving her money whenever she needs it. And then when he’s with Sylvia, he feels like he’s taking advantage of their history by seeking comfort in her, delighting in their joint cleverness when they have intellectual discussions.
As for Ivan, we’re stuck in a hamster wheel of resentment towards Peter, anger over Peter’s very judgmental reaction to him when Ivan told him he was dating an older woman, and then a non-stop pile-on of misunderstandings over what Peter must think (despite never saying it).
One of the impacts of Rooney’s choice to not to have any quotation marks is that both the inner monologue and what is said outloud start to feel real from the character’s point of view. The internal justifications and the outward lies bleed together, intertwining to the point where it becomes hard to differentiate the truth. Peter has a flighty voice, staccato in his thoughts, flitting from one angst to another as he criss-crosses Dublin. He irritated me, yet I also fully felt like I understood where his head was at. Every contradiction within Peter made complete sense to me — which isn’t a great revelation about myself, honestly. (Also, I was simultaneously amazed and unsurprised by how much stuff he gets done in a grief-addled stupor — I know quite a lot of high-funtioning depressives, so that felt very familiar, and also very exhausting).
In contrast, Ivan’s voice is a bit more solid, more reasoned — until it comes to his brother, then he veers wildly into the irrational territory. He paints in broad strokes about how terrible his brother is, managing to convince himself of Peter’s inherent evilness even when he knows he’s basing his reactions on exaggerations. He’s only 22, so young and so sure of his knowledge of how the world is. When his father dies, it punches out all certainty, but I think Ivan still needs a few more years to realize that.
Effectively, Rooney is skilled at portraying how people lie to themselves. Experiencing that heady fall into their minds reminded me how lying to myself feels so very much like sinking into a warm bath — it’s comforting to absorb the lies and half-truths, feel it wash over me along with all the rationalizations we say to make ourselves think we’re ok, even as we know the longer we stay in the tub, the less pleasant it will be; our skin will get pruney and the water will eventually get cold and feel dirty. A bath always feels like a mistake and a waste of water when you’re in it past the point of comfort.
That’s why it felt somewhat comforting that besides Peter and Ivan’s point of view chapters, we also get Margaret’s. Her voice is light, yet full of depth. She is a woman who has lived — and has come to terms with her supposed inadequacies, the unfairness of her situations, and has chosen to make her life into the most content it can be. What that means is that while she initially is a bit iffy about her relationship with Ivan, she is also nakedly honest to herself about her desire for him and how much she likes how he makes her feel. She allows herself to enjoy their time together. Reading her chapters in between the brothers felt like taking a deep yoga breath — “Ok, so this is what a healthy amount of feeling troubled is like.”
Of course, the underlying point is how the two brothers are dealing with their grief of losing their father. They turn against each other and against themselves, and it makes them very unreliable judges of almost any good thing in their life. Rooney handles all the shades of their grief expertly — and god, I know I keep bringing up the lack of quote marks for speech, but do you know how hard that is to do, to let it land as intended? She performed that sleight of hand between inner thoughts and speech with such ease that a reader accepts without question the mixed messages being conveyed. Not only is it fucking hard, it’s also forcing the reader to pay attention to what the characters are telling themselves.
Intermezzo is my first ever Sally Rooney. Obviously I’ve heard the Normal People hype — I hope I’ll be able to get it off the library waitlist one day — but I had virtually zero knowledge of what her writing is like until I cracked opened this book. I’m not keen on some of the sexual dynamics of the book (I’m fine with Peter being into rough sex with Naomi; it’s more that I don’t believe either are in love with each other, even as the words on the page seem to be convincing themselves of it. Sorry, but I’ve seen so many of these massive age gap/wealth gap relationships in the familiar older man-child-younger-woman-child combo that I know that both parties know better) but this was overall a complete surprise for me. I was in awe of Rooney’s play with rhythm, inner monologue, and just the light touch she has with leading the reader through her characters’ headspace. A couple reviews said Rooney was greatly inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses, and it is to her credit that I actually looked up discussion classes on Ulysses so that I could feel less intimidated on tacking it. I wanted to see what she drew from it.
Not much else for me to say other than it’s May 1 and this is my first review of the year. I could give a dozen reasons why I’ve been lagging on the reading and reviewing, but we all know it’s because it’s 2026, the year of what-the-actual-fuckery, so yea, kudos to all of you who are actively reading and writing — truly, I am in awe of you.
