When I read a Sally Rooney novel, I am happy to spend time in her world, but at the end, I’m quite happy to return to my own. The characters in each of her books are in very different situations, but her focus is always a close examination of interpersonal relations. In this one the age of the main characters presents issues. Brothers Peter, 32, a successful barrister, and Ivan, 22, a chess whiz who is not so good at social connections are particularly emotionally vulnerable as their father had recently died.
At a chess event where Ivan played ten others at a time, he made a connection with a woman who organized the event who happens to be 36 and divorced. Their connection is appealingly told and each is irresistible to the other, though Margaret has misgivings. It turns out that everyone else in their various worlds agree that the age difference is scandalous and it is as if Ivan were a 14-year-old kid. Peter, despite having a complicated complicated love life that includes living with a 23-year-old woman, disapproves. I find the strong reaction a bit hard to believe. I thought we were more accustomed to this after Emmanuel Macron, 24 years younger than his wife Brigitte, was elected President of France in 2017.
Peter’s love life includes Sylvia, a long-time love with interests that match his. She was permanently injured in a car crash and is in such pain that she broke off her relationship with Peter because she cannot be a full partner. They have remained connected, and not always in a healthy way.
As the stories unfolded, I found the sections describing Peter to be confusing at times while the Ivan/Margaret stories were clear to me. Though Peter had great self-assurance, he did seem to be crashing around, taking prescription drugs and drinking too much, and the sections focused on him seemed to reflect that.
Ivan, musing on Peter’s denunciation of Margaret as “not a normal woman,” based on her connection with Ivan, says that Peter assigns a high, nearly moral degree of value to the concept of “normal,” by which Peter means conforming with the dominant culture. Ivan says in fact Margaret is what Peter would consider normal; she is intelligent, cultured, at ease in social situations.
One issue that I’ve seen in Rooney’s work before is that of social class. Peter succeeded in moving into a higher social class than his Polish father’s beginnings through hard work. He resents the offhand comments of his colleagues, reminding him that he had to work for what they were born to. Unwritten dress codes and rules of speech reveal taste, manners, and culture. In his college years on foreign trips, he studied Italian art while others slept off hangovers. Rooney writes eloquently of this.
I learned from Dwight Garner’s NYT review that there is a backlash against Rooney in some quarters of the literary establishment. He said the enthusiasm he expressed for this book was met with disbelief and some were apoplectic. He said he admires it almost without reservation. For myself I will say I was, once again, happy to visit her world which in this case ended on an optimistic, positive note.
Sally Rooney, Intermezzo, Ferrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024, 454 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the public library.