The Type of World We Want
by Orlaith Darling
Faber, 448pp, ISBN 9780571365463, £20.00
In her 1871 masterpiece Middlemarch, George Elliot wrote: ‘we are not afraid of telling over and over again how it is that a man comes to fall in love with a woman.’ This faithfulness to depicting human relationships and the specific historic, economic, and social conditions in which they form and disintegrate is a literary project demonstrably shared by Sally Rooney over her four-book oeuvre. Rooney (like Elliot and the other Victorian social realists) is not primarily a writer, a public intellect, or a socialist theorist. She is, as her author’s bio baldly states, a ‘novelist'. And in Intermezzo, she more than lives up to this at once humble and weighty title. Reading Intermezzo is to witness a novelist who, at the height of her powers, is taking form seriously — and Rooney takes it for all its worth.
On the level of theme, Rooney is firmly in her wheelhouse. We find the main characters, Peter and Ivan Koubek, having just lost their father and trying to forge a life through this bereavement by way of intimate relationships. Peter, a financially-stable barrister in his early thirties, is embroiled in a semi-secret situation-ship with a much younger college student and former OnlyFans sex worker, Naomi, whom he meets online . In between erotically-charged visits to her squalid house (which is technically a squat and from which she is violently evicted over the course of the novel), he pursues a ‘virtuous partnership’ with a former long-term girlfriend, Sylvia. His relationship with Naomi balances their mutually raw sexual attraction against Peter’s guilt about their age difference and his anxiety as to whether he is exploiting Naomi. By contrast, his relationship with Sylvia is measured in long meals and lengthy philosophical discussions, and is largely chaste due to her difficulties with sex following a catastrophic accident years previously.
Ivan, on the other hand, is a decade younger and aeons less sexually experienced than his older brother (Peter admits to wondering, at various points of Ivan’s adolescent, whether his kid-brother was asexual). Now an adult, Ivan spends his days trying to recover his early promise as a chess prodigy, a lifestyle he funds by means of intermittent work as a data analyst. It is while playing chess in Leitrim that he meets Margaret, a thirty-six-year-old woman who runs the local arts centre and with whom he falls in love. This is all, of course, terra firma for Rooney, whose emotionally-freighted and intellectually-engaged depictions of romance have earned her the dubious title of ‘the voice of a generation’.
The novel’s very title could be read as an anticipatory move on Rooney’s part, an attempt to get ahead of the reviewers eager to champion or condemn her. Is Intermezzo, as in musical performance, a pleasant but ultimately lightweight interlude in between more significant movements — in Rooney’s case, her acclaimed debut Conversations with Friends and much-lauded follow-up Normal People? Or is Intermezzo, as in chess, an unexpected move that changes totally the course of play? It has been read as both. To the former, The Nation finds it ‘ultimately quaint’, the Times ‘precious and prissy’, and The New Statesman suggests that it is ‘less distinctive, less sui generis', than her earlier works. To the latter, The New Statesman also identifies ‘a loud rejection of the spirit of Rooney’s former books’ and The Washington Post argues that it ‘shows less ruthless restraint than Rooney’s previous books.’ But where this latest Rooney novel is particularly strong is the dexterity and intelligence with which it melds questions of life and love with questions of form. And, as the Irish Times notes, the possibilities of form has been a ‘consistent’ feature of Rooney’s oeuvre. As such, Intermezzo is not an intermezzo in the sense either of music or chess; rather, it signifies both a continuation and maturing of what have always been Rooney’s literary concerns.
These concerns — the possibilities of love to change other people, the ambivalence of wanting to be normal, the difficulty of carving out an emotionally fulfilling and moral life in a deeply unjust world — are, for Rooney, necessarily all bound up in the question of form and of the novel itself. Her interest in the 19th-century novel is well documented and each of her previous works has taken up, in some sense, historical novelistic conventions. While Conversations with Friends and Normal People are Bildungsromane, both Beautiful World, Where Are You and Conversations espouse an epistolary mode. In Conversations, Frances is reading Middlemarch and, in Normal People, she takes her epigraph from Daniel Deronda. In Intermezzo, Sylvia lectures on ‘Sexuality and the Origins of the Novel’ and presents at Jane Austen symposia, and Lola Seaton has noted the Victorian names Rooney often chooses for her female characters (Frances, Marianne, Alice, Sylvia, Margaret). Of all four, Beautiful World most faithfully espouses the authority of the third person omniscient narrator we most associate with the Victorian novel. For instance, the narrative chapters which intersperse Alice and Eileen’s email exchanges unfold via the same formula: the setting of scene (with clear place and time), the introduction of characters (including physical descriptions), and a knowing narrative voice (sometimes attributing emotions and intentions to the characters). Take this example, from the middle of the novel:
On the platform of a train station, late morning, early June: two women embracing after a separation of several months. Behind them, a tall fair-haired man alighting from the train carrying two suitcases. The women, unspeaking, their eyes closed tight, their arms wrapped around each other [. . .]. Were they aware, in the intensity of their embrace, of something slightly ridiculous about this tableau, something almost comical [?]
Intermezzo’s narrative voice is, by contrast, a return to the style of Normal People: a third person narrative living cheek-by-jowl with the characters’ psychologies, and subtly inflected with those characters’ anxieties. This, for instance, is the moment Ivan sees Margaret for the first time:
While he’s thinking, a door comes open – not the main town hall door, but a smaller kind of fire exit door at the side – and a woman enters. She’s carrying a set of keys. The other men hardly seem to acknowledge her entrance: they just glance over in her direction and then away again. No one says anything to her. It’s probably one of these situations that other people find instantly comprehensible, and everyone other than Ivan has worked out at a glance exactly who this woman is and why she’s here. She happens to be noticeably attractive, which makes her presence in the room at this juncture all the more curious.
As readers, we know no more than Ivan at this stage: we do not know that this woman is Margaret, that she has keys because she works at the arts centre, or that she will go on to have a relationship with Ivan. We get Ivan’s perspective (it is him observing her) via a detached narrative voice, one focused on the accumulation of facts and descriptive detail. Nevertheless, small inclusions (‘probably', ‘seem to’, ‘happens to be’) give us the sense of Ivan’s distinct positioning — his subjectivity — in this scene. But Intermezzo also flirts with modernist techniques. Both Peter’s perambulations around Dublin and his stream of conscious narration have a distinctly modernist, flâneur-esque air. The many passages in which he wheels around Dublin ‘with long free strides’ suggest the sheer, unfettered mobility of a man ‘[I]n the prime of his life’: ‘And rounding the corner the way the wind comes bowling down Baggot Street, rattling through the trees. Everything rinsed fresh by cold air and water, everything clean and new, he thinks, yes.'
We see in such moments — and in the alternating narrative styles Rooney uses — the gulf between Ivan and Peter as characters. The novel is in some ways driven by the brothers’ relationship: about the failure to communicate which, and despite their deep-seated love for one another, means they spend half of the novel estranged. The point is, though, that, in Intermezzo, Rooney takes this — a concern with the human relationships that has characterised her novelistic career to date — and elevates it to the level of form and genre. That is, the state of the brothers’ relationship is not narrated as events or plot — indeed, they only appear in three scenes together in the whole novel. Instead, it is their contrasting ways of being in the world — how they are — that sets them at loggerheads. And with the brothers being literally proximate to each other so rarely, Rooney must use formal convention and literary style to establish and make meaningful this difference. Hence, Ivan’s mind is structured like a Victorian novel, whereas Peter reads altogether more fragmented and, well, modernist.
On a formal level, the Victorian novel contextualises the detail of everyday life within the normative social settings where life takes place. By way of Bildungsromane and marriage plots, it sketched the individual’s socialisation and their reconciliation to their historic moment. Similarly, Ivan often seems to be on a data-gathering exercise: he observes the accumulation of detail in the social and physical world but sometimes struggles to understand how the diversity, breadth, and complexity of this sensory data can be made into something orderly and, more to the point, how he might fit in this order. Take this, our introduction to Ivan in the second chapter:
Ivan is standing on his own in the corner, while the men from the chess club move the chairs and tables around. […] Alone Ivan is standing, wanting to sit down, but uncertain as to which of the chairs need to be rearranged still, and which of them are in their correct places already.
Ivan was close with his late father, who we are told was a conflict-averse and peaceable man. If Peter is to be believed, though, their father also glossed over very real resentments and misgivings, wordlessly ensuring that others suppressed their feelings lest the smooth surface of life be broken. When he dies, the façade of order he provided crumbles, and Ivan must confront the particular distributions of social capital, inexplicable convention, and unarticulated hierarchy that both order and disorder society. He must face, too, his ambivalent feelings about his older brother which, in their father’s presence, had been kept largely under wraps. Ivan’s squaring himself with the world proceeds more or less according to the Bildungs genre, with each new challenge (his burgeoning relationship with Margaret, his febrile relationship with Peter, his having to house his dog who had lived with his father, his return to competitive chess after a slump in performance and confidence) presenting an opportunity for both personal development and socialisation. The fact that Ivan successfully navigates the ‘never-ending struggle[s]’ presented by everyday life; the fact that he has overcome his less than salubrious teenage beliefs (we are told he previously watched incel-y YouTube channels); and the fact that he maintains throughout the novel a sense that the world does, as he muses, ‘make room for goodness and decency’: all of this makes puts one in mind of one of the Victorian novel’s most important themes, redemption.
Peter, by contrast, feels that both himself and the world are beyond saving. He is a seemingly well-adjusted, tax-paying contributor to society. He has excelled by all conventional metrics: attended the best university in the country, been a top debater, sustained a meaningful romantic relationship, and found noble and well-paid work representing the downtrodden in the court of law. He is, on the surface of things, more closely aligned with the normative order of Irish society than Ivan, who is still feeling out what his place in that order might be. This perhaps explains some of Ivan’s resentment: he thinks that Peter ‘is the kind of person who goes along the surface of life very smoothly.’ Certainly, Peter is the sort of Rooney character who responds to accusations of emotional distance thus: ‘Naomi, sweetheart, he says in a friendly voice. My dad died.’ And yet his effortless, detached affect, and his success by normative metrics, sits atop a turbulent interior which is mediated through truncated sentence fragments:
The meaningless lives people live. And afterwards, oblivion, forever. Futile rage at nothing. Directed one way or another, what’s the difference. […] Thought rises calmly to the surface of his mind: I wish I was dead.
This keenly observed sense of futility is only sharpened by Peter’s memories of bygone glory days, in university ‘[w]hen life was perfect. It was once.’ Now, all he sees is violence as mundane as it is shocking. His first love’s, Sylvia’s, life has been changed in ways both irrevocable and quotidian by a car accident; Naomi’s presence on OnlyFans means she is sent 'deranged threats of sexual violence on the internet, stupid whore, I’ll kill you, I will slit your throat.’
Rooney’s Dublin is also awash with the low-level, accumulative violence we might expect of a Dickens novel: in the contemporary city, landlords are ‘bloodsucking parasites’ who employ private security guards to “drag” evictees ‘up the stairs’ while bailiffs throw their belongings ‘out on the street.’ Naomi is at times presented as kind of street urchin whom Peter is called to rescue from prison when she is evicted. Along with her permanently dirty feet, blackened from the general filth of the squat she inhabits, Naomi is also possessed of the urchin’s wily self-composure in the face of procedural grimness. Hence, she is both the ‘calculating liar [and] the exploited innocent, yes', and Peter must question whether she is with him because she wants to be or because she is ‘legally homeless’ — because she has ‘No job, no family support, no fixed address, no state entitlements, no money to finish college. Owner of nothing in the world but her own perfect body.’ With social and economic violence so pervasive, the only response seems to be anhedonia. And so, underneath the confident, suave face he presents to the world, Peter is also the type of character who thinks about killing himself, and who punctuates questions with full-stops rather than question marks, as if to suggest that he is simply overcome by life’s mundane cruelties: ‘Under these conditions, is life endurable.’ He is, more than Ivan and much like a modernist protagonist, someone whose inner voice is at odds with his public appearance.
Some reviewers have (tiresomely) accused Rooney of moral didacticism. However, Rooney’s longstanding interest in morality is a question with which the novel, since the 19th century, has been preoccupied. Rooney is not interested in moralising, but rather in understanding how we justify our behaviours to ourselves and each other. We see this, again, played out in the brothers’ relationship. Peter castigates various of Ivan’s beliefs and Ivan accuses Peter of privileging principle over conduct. In one of the three scenes co-populated by Ivan and Peter, the brothers have a physical fight about, more or less, what it means to be moral. Peter recalls Ivan’s teenage susceptibility to ideas like ‘feminism is evil, or women make up lies about being raped’; Ivan points out that Peter’s actions towards women have often been less than unimpeachable. For Ivan, ‘[c]onduct is more important than belief’ while, for Peter, this is far from given. Framed slightly differently, this disagreement is also about form: is the principle (form) underlying action what is important (even when this principle is not always carried through), or is action (content rather than form) all that really matters?
The moral/formal mismatch between the brothers is also mirrored in the prose styles associated with each. Peter’s stream of consciousness facilitates suppression of past misconduct: ‘He wants almost, and at the same time wants not, to tell Sylvia what happened, that Naomi, etc. The website, etc.’ But, by substituting ‘etc.’ for his moral misgivings, by the very act of suppressing them, Peter signals the depth of his self-questioning. By contrast, Ivan’s morals can seem co-extensive with manners: with his search for ‘formal etiquette’ and the rules of ‘how to behave under [given] circumstances'. There is, then, between the brothers a tension between principle and pragmatism which is at play even when Ivan’s conduct falls short. For instance, he spends two minutes ‘analysing past events, his own mistakes and regrets’, before deciding it such introspection is pointless and he would be better off playing chess.
In outlining at length the differences between how the Koubek brothers (the name may be Slovakian but feels redolent of Tolstoy) navigate the world and account for their moral shortcomings, I want to underline the seriousness with which Rooney takes form. The reasons for this seriousness were perhaps more obviously on display in Beautiful World: recall Alice’s concern that the novel ‘relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth […,] by suppressing the truth of the world — packing it tightly down beneath the glittering surface of the text.'
In Intermezzo, the question of how to live morally is also a question of whether the forms of life we know can deliver the type of world we want, which is also a question of how individual behaviour fits into the wider structures which expand and curtail, in the first place, the choices available to specific types of people. Each of the characters struggles to find order in life, which is another way of saying that they struggle to find a form that fits their specific life, makes them legible within the wider social structure, and allows them to feel and be moral. Hence, Peter’s constantly frustrated hunger for justice as a lawyer, and Ivan’s training in formal logic and chess openings; hence, the rigour of Sylvia’s intellectual engagement with the world that so damaged her body, and Margaret’s slow relinquishment of conventionality’s ‘netting’ in favour of love; and hence Naomi’s rejection of logic and order in favour of a pure, almost naïvely disinterested ‘appetite’ in the first place. By probing the forms life can take while still being ‘morally legible’, Rooney is also asking (albeit gently) questions of the novel as a bourgeois form, and of the romance as a genre with one presumed ending. In much the same way that she makes the authorial decision to stick with the novel form despite its associations with bourgeois capitalism, Rooney does not expect her characters to invent entirely new ways of living. Her novels are historical in the Lukácsian sense — she dramatises those moments where individual characters face the choice between following desire, principle, or instinct on the one hand, and formal, historical, and social legibility on the other. And all of this is in the service of feeling out ‘[w]hat can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking.’
Her use for the novel, it seems, is its formal compatibility with the human relationships which, for Rooney, seem to be the only reason for living. In one particularly dark moment, Peter considers ‘[t]he final permanent nothing that is the only truth.’ Against the vastness and totality of this void, the task remains — for life and literature — the same: to seek out, cling to, and create meaning enough to go on living and to go on being moral. The everydayness of both love and the novel might seem unworthy of such high stakes — both seem, in Peter’s words, to be ‘experiment[s] bound almost certainly for one kind of failure or another.’ But Rooney is, as ever, interested also in how small daily miracles make this life seem more bearable than is proportionate. Along with the formal oppositions of principle and conduct, morality and desire, the question of meaning is also uncoiled by way of instances which suspend both the unfeeling bureaucratic order of daily life and the existential need to find an overarching order for life itself. These are unthinking and everyday acts of care that make moral goodness seem easy, seem like the way we want to be: ‘making up [a] packed lunch, Nutella sandwiches, an apple wrapped in kitchen roll’ or the unrationed totality of love a dog shows its owner after an absence.
As with each of her novels before this, Rooney’s power as a writer is to focus attention on the crazy hope we place in other people’s ability to sustain us and the anxiety we feel about what we could possibly offer in return. And this is the main point of continuity across Rooney’s oeuvre: like Frances in Conversations, she sees that ‘[y]ou live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position’; like Marianne in Normal People, she believes that ‘people can really change one another’; like Eileen in Beautiful World, she hopes that ‘the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care.’ And, like Ivan, she is an optimist on all of the above.