Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Editorial Assistant Book Club: November 2024

Popular Infallibility

For the majority of my life, young women who became successful artists in music, film, and literature were generally singled out and attacked unfairly when they rose to fame and popularity quickly. A predictable critical and common-person backlash followed these artists with the overall spirit of taking them down a peg or two. Novelist Sally Rooney’s star exploded with her first two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People, and she too faced this backlash. The reaction is hard to quantify, and certainly didn’t come from the majority of established literary critics, but words like overrated, flat, and self-indulgent were tossed around. She seemed to receive more negative attention about the autobiographical nature of her work than her male counterparts did. And perhaps the most intense criticism came from the left side of the political spectrum as Rooney became tied to “Marxism” (Rooney is a self-defined Marxist, but her novels themselves only graze the surface of politics at best—perhaps why some leftist critics are not overly kind to her work). A half dozen years ago, the conversation about the downfall of literature at the hands of gazing at our own navels somehow all centered around Sally Rooney. This was around 2018 when her second novel Normal People came out. Just a year after Taylor Swift’s Reputation album was released—an album that was Swift’s response to relentless negative coverage by tabloids and corners of the internet media.

Fast-forward to 2024 and we’re in a different place with a lot of our artists and female artists in particular. Taylor Swift finally released her first book last week with a raft of typos, shoddy printing of photos, workmanlike captions (perhaps to no surprise of anyone in publishing). Yet part of the response to these obvious errors was completely predictable and somewhat deranged: “Criticizing word choice isn’t necessary,” wrote one fan. “These are her words, as she spoke them.” Or this: “I honestly loved the lack of editing in the writing, it made everything feel more authentic coming from Taylor rather than an edited fake sounding version.

While there have always been a contingent of hardcore Taylor Swift fans who will defend everything Swift does with zero room for even a trace of criticism (see above quotes), the difference of six years between Reputation and now is that this fringe fandom view has moved into the mainstream. Everyone is a Swiftie. You hardly need extensive sourcing support this. People of all ages and backgrounds rush to graze the fringe of her cape in an effort to get a little bit of her universe-shifting dust.

The subsuming of popular culture as an expression of fandom has been happening over the past two decades in a slow progression. But arguably the best example for its origin is far before Swift’s Eras Tour, and lies with another mega female pop star: Beyoncé. Before Swift’s recent escalation to the status of untouchable deity, Beyoncé paved the way for popular infallibility. Beyoncé’s own hardcore fans, dubbed the BeyHive (a play on Queen Bee, making the fans her “drones”—you can’t make this up), can be traced back to 2009. And not many years after that, much earlier than other artists, around the release of her album Lemonade in 2016 I’d say, Beyoncé became untouchable among critics and the general public alike. An essay from 2018 by New York Times critic Wesley Morris explaining in gut-twisting, back-bending fashion the place Beyoncé occupies as the best example of this infallibility complex:

This shift in priorities comes with moral side effects, and the side effects are scaring people — smart, opinionated people; not just white men — from saying the wrong the thing about “Atlanta” or “Crazy Rich Asians” or “Wonder Woman,” from not liking them, or not liking them correctly. If Beyoncé comes up at a cookout, do you offer more than a dutiful “yasss, queen”?

Beyoncé is, of course, the most traffic-stopping artist we have. She is also the patron saint of these “sshhh” times. If “Insecure” feels too important to doubt, Beyoncé is almost too iconic to discuss. Dare do something as simple as rank her last three albums in the “wrong” preferential order — “Lemonade,” “Beyoncé,” then “4” — or wonder about the wisdom of the choreography during a tiny part of her Coachella performance last spring, and check for the Beyhive to sting up your Twitter account in her name. Other artists know this. Holding her brand-new Album of the Year Grammy last year, Adele practically groveled for Beyoncé’s forgiveness.

This cultural shift in pop music has come tumbling down even to our small corner of culture known as literature. Longtime readers will know this proclamation with familiarity: Sally Rooney is one of the very few of wildly popular literary writers of her generation, it’s why we read her new book last month. Rooney like Swift has also experienced this infallibility arc along a similar timeline. If you had to pinpoint when Sally Rooney crossed over from overly criticized ingénue to unimpeachable, it would be 2021 and the prepublication buzz of her third novel and the Sally Rooney Bucket Hat. Rooney’s third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You turned out to be her least rated novel with readers, and yet the discourse around Rooney felt like it changed among thinking readers. Mirroring the rest of the wider culture Rooney seemed to be let in the pantheon of the unquestioned. As one of the more negative reviews of her latest novel noted:

Seven months before the release of Intermezzo, a Goodreads user rated the book five stars and posted the following comment: ‘this is the most exciting news of my year and i got engaged the week it was announced.’ This ‘review’ had over 2,000 likes the last time I checked—and seems as good a jumping-off point as we’re going to get for the Rooneyverse, a sea driven by swelling tides of hetero-optimism, and one critics have been extraordinarily eager to dive into.

Criticism is Respect

We’ve not found a happy medium between the vitriolic dismissiveness of talented female artists and the blind rubberstamping of celebration. We’ve moved from bad faith analysis to only positive analysis and have missed the most important thing entirely: real criticism. In an NPR interview I once heard a member of the US Women’s national soccer team openly tell the interviewer she welcomed more criticism of the team’s performance. What she articulated so well there (I have searched for hours and cannot find the actual interview, sorry) was that the lack of real criticism the women’s soccer team received in contrast to the—much less successful (she didn’t say this part)—men’s team was ultimately a sign of disrespect. Her point was that “we’re happy with whatever you do” was not an adequate replacement for the past attitude of “women’s sports don’t matter.” While it may seem counterintuitive, the superfan attitude towards artists, in particular women, somehow caring too much results in not genuinely caring at all. Rendering no judgement is infantilizing to a great artist (a great athlete, a great whatever…), not an expression of love. If an artist can do no wrong, then how can their achievements of genuine greatness be properly appreciated?

Intermezzo

Rooney’s latest novel Intermezzo felt a bit like being assigned a book in school—reading with the latent pressure of popular and institutional infallibility bearing down. Trying to figure out why what you are reading is of value even as you struggle to find value in it. And it took a preamble this long to get to the honest truth and real criticism of Rooney: I fought through most of Intermezzo and if the cover did not have Sally Rooney’s name on it, I probably would not have made it to the final page.

Intermezzo is about two brothers, Ivan and Peter, and their three girlfriends. Ivan is a somewhat competitive chess player—hence the cover and title—and Peter is progressive lawyer. The premise of the novel rests on the taboo of a relationship between 22-year-old Ivan and his 36-year-old girlfriend Margaret. At a gut level this never felt like a serious conflict to hang a novel on, and although the characters seem quite concerned about what this age difference will do to them socially, it isn’t ever entirely convincing. Ivan’s brother is critical of him, but “society” never shows up to make their case for why Ivan and Margaret shouldn’t be together. And Rooney never has either of her characters do something that makes the reader call this into question. Such that when Margaret says late in the novel, “To see herself as the brother must see her, a middle-aged woman taking advantage of a naïve grieving boy”, we have no evidence to point to that Margaret’s taken advantage of Ivan or that he’s naïve, or to assuage our doubts that 36 is really “middle-aged”. On the scale of taboo, if these were my friends or family, this situation feels more “that’s pretty weird, I need to know more” than “this is really concerning.”

The older brother, Peter’s romantic predicament is that he has two exceptional women — beautiful, kind, smart— who both want to be with him. However, he feels he has to choose between them because of the same nebulous society that Ivan and Margaret worry about. One of Peter’s paramours is similar to Ivan’s age making Peter a huge hypocrite— and maybe as was Rooney’s intention, shows that with genders reversed none of the characters or Rooney are similarly worried about an age gap.

Besides the romances, the death of Peter and Ivan’s father hangs over the novel. The brothers are opposites— Ivan, a stereotypical chess prodigy who is highly analytical, a bit of a nerdy duckling with a low EQ and Peter, a handsome, charming, high-powered ladies’ man. Where age finally does seem to come into play in the novel is that the brothers disapprove of each other because they are at different life stages— Ivan seemingly has no job and plays competitive chess occasionally and Peter is busy lawyer. However, for the vast majority of the novel the two brothers avoid each other entirely, Ivan blocks Peter’s calls and they spin their wheels separately dealing with their own lives and relationships for nearly 300 pages.

It is these big creative choices that inform why Intermezzo felt like such tough sledding page-to-page. What was great about Rooney’s first two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People, was the new feelings of tension she was able to capture in tried-and-true stories—affairs and young love. These novels had the spare, unsaid, often seemingly underwritten quiet intensity of Raymond Carver, a writer generations of MFAs had tried and failed to conquer the style of before Rooney. Like the sword in the stone, partly what made some readers and observers so angry is that what Rooney was able to do didn’t look that hard. But with Intermezzo she has lost a lot of that ma. And negative space without energy ultimately feels like filler. Without unsaid tension, Carver stories are just people talking and making drinks, which is why so many would-be copycats fail. There are lots of literal eating and drinking passages in Intermezzo, ones that feel like they’re from a much less seasoned author. But having no conflict on a grander scale which creates this filler feeling, is best captured by Ivan contemplating every aspect of his phone in one scene:

When Ivan re-enters his bedroom, he can see that his phone is ringing on the bed where he left it. The screen is lighted, displaying an incoming call from a mobile he doesn’t recognize. The phone is on the vibrate setting, but the vibration is almost soundless, the noise absorbed by his mattress, so he didn't hear it from outside. Also the charger is plugged in still, because the phone was on two percent battery when he left it here to make himself the noodles. He is conscious of an extreme sense of urgency, a frantic urgency to answer this incoming call, not knowing how long it has already been ringing.

Shutting the door behind him, dropping his laptop on the bed and setting his bowl of noodles down on the bedside table, he taps the green icon and answers, realizing too late that the phone is not sufficiently charged to unplug it from the wall yet, so in order to hear anything he'll have to crouch on the floor beside the nightstand, holding the charging phone, which is also really hot, up to his face. Arranging himself in this way, crouching down on the carpet, he says into the phone: Hello?

This passage seems to want to induce anxiety through its hyper fixation, but without the reader feeling Ivan is truly at risk of ever failing in his conversation with his lover. Thus what should be ma becomes mundanity.

Although Rooney claims not to listen to or care about reader, so much of the novels that have followed her first two feel in direct opposition to the wider feedback she received early in her career. In Intermezzo Rooney consciously or subconsciously escapes previous criticisms of the autobiographical nature of her novels by centering the narrative on two men with vastly different CVs than her own. Like her third novel Rooney also adds a completely new stylistic form to separate it from her first two. In Intermezzo she writes in a choppy, stream-of-consciousness prose for Peter, which seems to fly in the face of the glassy, direct sentences she’s known for. These chapters come in a series of sensations and fragments like so:

Nine already by the time he leaves. Four minutes past. Also a little high because they smoked together afterwards. Types into the white box: Running about 20mins late, sorry. Cool darkness gathers around the lighted screen. Trees waving silent branches overhead, tram running past with faces in windows Lock the phone and pockets. James’s street at night.

In neither instance has Rooney suddenly become “a bad writer”, she can pull off the fragments and there are occasionally beautiful lines, funny moments, and sparkling insights in Ivan’s point of view. Sentences like “Her high cold austerity, her palisade of personal space” were an oasis in a desert.

But style is not substance, and Rooney seems to not have found an effect that matches completely with character or circumstance. There is some notion that this choppy style is supposed to mirror Peter’s chaotic inner life (depression) and substance abuse, but again it finds itself at odds with his actual circumstance. Take for instance how Marlon James uses this fragmented style in the opening chapter of his novel The Brief History of Seven Killings, here’s 14-year-old Bam Bam:

I know I was fourteen. That me know. I also know that too many people talk too much, especially the American, who never shut up, just switch to a laugh every time he talk 'bout you, and it sound strange how he put your name beside people we never hear 'bout, Allende Lumumba, a name that sound like a country that Kunta Kinte come from. The American, most of the time hide him eye with sunglasses like he is a preacher from America come to talk to black people. Him and the Cuban come sometimes together, sometimes on they own, and when one talk the other always quiet. The Cuban don't fuck with guns because guns always need to be needed, him say.

For Bam Bam, not an orderly-thinking adult and one whose life is filled with violence and chaos, the fragmentary style mirrors his world and who he is in it. For Peter in Rooney’s novel, a otherwise competent lawyer with nary a crises or consequence, this staccato doesn’t quite have the intended effect. We collect a lot of sensation and mundane detail about Peter’s life without feeling as if they are accumulating to a better understanding of the conflicts we are told he’s grappling with.

Stick Around and Find Out

It’s exceedingly, almost impossibly rare that a novel gets leaps and bounds better after nearly 300 pages, but Intermezzo does just that. And the answer to why feels somewhat simple: the real conflict of the novel, two brothers who are opposites and don’t like each other, are finally forced to interact. All of the sudden, when these two planets enter each other’s orbit rather the drifting in space, the book comes alive. Ivan and Peter finally fight in person rather than complaining to third parties or trapped in their own heads— and this spills over into their relationships which they finally have to confront in meaningful ways. The ma gratefully returns and even Peter’s fragmentary sensations take on a new life:

Room spinning in dim circles before his eyes. To catch and hold his gaze on a single spot: and then to feel it slide out, away, as if pulled from under him. I'll find you somewhere, he says. You know, my dad's house is there, if you need it. In Kildare, it's not convenient, but it's empty. There's a train. And I can help you out with money. I don't want to make life hard for you.

In the dark she makes some kind of gesture, like a shrug, her shoulders moving.

Okay, she says. Touches her nose then with her fingers. Do you hate me? she asks.

Then immediately she gives something like a strained laugh and adds: Actually, don't say, I don't want to know.

But it was one scene that was neither in Ivan’s or Peter’s perspective that most frustratingly felt like what the novel could have been. It’s from Margaret, Ivan’s older girlfriend, and we are given access to why her relationship with Ivan is complicated and it’s not because of her age but because of her personal history, in particular her ex-husband:

He doesn’t mean any harm, Margaret. It’s an illness. He can't help it. What about the time he fell down the staircase in Walsh's and the girl behind the bar had to call an ambulance. Half the town out on the street watching him carried away on a stretcher, all of them knowing full well that Margaret was just around the corner, in the town hall, checking tickets for the cinema club, while her husband was being carted off to the accident and emergency. Where was Anna then with her talk of common sense and good judgement? She was fretting and fawning over him like the rest. Poor man. Poor Ricky. Nothing was ever his fault, the blameless lamb. Not a word for the shame he brought on Margaret in the eyes of everyone they knew. No, Margaret didn't need anyone's sympathy, she could look after herself. It was weak people who needed compassion, weak men especially, like Ricky, the unfortunate soul. Margaret was strong, everyone always said so, a fine strong woman. For that alone, how many people hated her. And would relish her humiliation now at last it had come. In-decent, sordid, making a show of herself. No wonder that husband of hers took to the drink. Who would defend her now, speak up for her, take her side? Of all those who had relied on her, complained to her about their own sorrows and received her sympathy in return, her family, her friends, who among them now would come to her defense? What loyalty had she purchased with her lifetime of good behavior and self-sacrifice?

This passage was a wash of relief and a reminder of Rooney’s full capabilities as a novelist. Although Intermezzo recovers, it does not fit into the rarest of novel shapes, “the slow burn”. Only because the first three-fourths of the novel do not serve as vital build-up for when the novel shifts into gear. The real novel feels like it’s trapped in the final 150 pages, and the vast redundancies of the first 300 pages becomes more acute by comparison. Reading Margaret’s perspective the realization dawned that perhaps if Rooney hadn’t spent so much time distancing herself from her past work, she could have written an extremely high-level short novel rather than a very long novel with bright spots.