Sep 18

Sep 18 Intermezzo

About the book

Author: Sally Rooney
Publisher: FSG

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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My Review

Happy fall, babes — Sally has come to crack our chests wide open once again.

Sally Rooney writes the kind of literary fiction that I love best: Novels with vivid, flawed characters that walk off the page and into your heart forever. Novels where the relationship between the characters is the entire point and plot, so you feel like you could happily read 100 more pages. (A few other books that give me this feeling are The Most Fun We Ever Had and Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow.)

Here, in Intermezzo, that skill is sharper than ever. The story centers on two brothers whose father recently passed away from cancer. Peter is a lawyer and adjunct professor in his 30s whose heart is torn between a spirited woman in her early 20s and his ex, who broke things off when an accident caused lifelong chronic pain but remains his best friend. Ivan is a chess whiz in his 20s who falls in love with a lovely, older, effectively divorced woman. The two of them come together and push apart, hurting each other and the women in their lives accidentally (and sometimes on purpose) again and again.

Rooney makes all of this conflict feel especially acute by alternating between sharp, devastating dialogue and taut, spiraling inner monologue. Ivan’s chapters are traditionally constructed, while Peter’s are fragmented and run-on and read like something closer to stream of consciousness. It comes together as a deeply effective look at grief, family dynamics, and (as always for Sally) the complicated nature of love and desire.

I could have kept reading this book forever, and it reminded me how badly I need to go back and finish Sally’s backlist.