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Intermezzo
by Sally Rooney · 2024
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Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.…
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"Rooney's exploration of family dynamics and personal identity, set against a contemporary Irish backdrop, fits Barack Obama's consistent interest in character-driven literary fiction."
"Well, the most obvious answer to this question is Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo. Every Rooney book is a major publishing event, and this latest offering—which centres on the fraught relationship between two Irish brothers—has received rave reviews almost across the board. NPR called it “her most moving novel yet”; The Guardian said it was “perfect – truly wonderful – a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements.” Intermezzo is set in Dublin, 2022, and unfolds over a period of around six months. Peter is a lawyer in his thirties; Ivan, his younger brother, is a chess player and data analyst in his twenties. Each has, as one might expect from a Rooney novel, a complicated love life. Peter’s unfolds as a triangle between himself, his former partner Sylvia, and a younger student, Naomi, who dabbles in sex work. Ivan falls for an older woman who fears the social repercussions of being seen together. “Is there a better novelist at work right now?” asked the Guardian reviewer, in exhausted admiration: “Rooney, author of four books in just seven years, has at this point already created more enduringly memorable characters than most novelists ever manage.” Rooney fans may also be interested in her recent interview with The New York Times , a relatively rare opportunity to hear her discuss her work at length. “With this ,” she explains of the novel’s stream-of-consciousness passages, “as soon as I conceived of Peter, the older-brother character, I wrote down what is now the first page of the novel almost instantly, and it has hardly changed. It was a fragmented, fluid way of trying to grapple with his interiority, and it started like that and basically went on like that.”"
"In Sally Rooney’s latest, Peter and Ivan are Irish brothers with a complicated relationship. As they navigate the aftermath of their father’s death, they struggle with how their relationships – with each other, with their late father and with those they hold close – color everything else around them. Rooney’s pointed prose and complex characters shine. Intermezzo is a story about how what you want and what you need are sometimes at odds. It’s eminently relatable – and an emotional sucker punch."