For the books page at the Wall Street Journal, I reviewed Intermezzo. Tired of Intermezzo reviews? Too bad! As Kesha once said—the party don’t start til I walk in. Here it is.
Of all the relationships open to the novel to explore—love affairs, marriages, friendships, rivalries, parents and children—the relationships that exist among siblings have similarities that combine several, with their own complications besides. Shared memories can also become conflicting eyewitness testimonies. And siblings are aware that they play some sort of mysterious central role in another person’s life and development, whether they want to or not.
Read the rest here. I really liked Intermezzo. If you have tried reading Rooney’s work before and hated it, I would say you have a .01% chance of liking it (as opposed to 0%).
Finally, I want to mention that I have what appears to be a reading of the whole Sylvia thing shared by no one (the Sylvia thing is here), but since the book hasn’t really been out very long, I’m footnoting my reading for the curious. Here is the footnote:1 There you go.
I was never any good at playing chess because I just loved moving the knight around. He was 1) a horse and 2) could move in an L. Why do anything else? This probably could explain a lot of my failures in life if I thought about it but I’m not going to.
And now… the BDM Industries Ranking of the Rooney Reviews (Read). Well, partial ranking, as these are organized alphabetically within the tiers. If a review isn’t in here I didn’t read it. I was paywalled out of various reviews and I cannot subscribe to more publications because I spent all my money on perfume samples and books2 and soon my deferred taxes so the ranking below is incomplete. Nevertheless.
The Perfect
“‘Intermezzo’ Review: When You Keep Your Rival Close,” B.D. McClay
Who is this genius? She writes like she has an exceptionally beautiful dog, and maybe—also—great hair. Who knows. It’s just a vibes thing.
eta: somebody emailed me with a small error they noticed, and i have emailed the editor, but are not scars what make the perfect even more perfect etc
The Good
“Sally Rooney’s Open Question,” Jess Bergman (The Nation)
I appreciate a lot about this review, but most of all, I appreciated Bergman’s attention to the brotherly relationship at the center of this novel. As somebody who is probably more invested in “character” than most other facets of novels, it’s always a pleasure to read a review that cares about it too.
“Sally Rooney’s ‘Intermezzo’ overflows with emotion,” Lilian Fishman
Like Bergman’s, this review is very sensitive and attuned to the character dynamics of Intermezzo. But I’m also frankly in awe of how much Fishman manages to discuss within the stringent guidelines of a newspaper review.
“Neurodivergence and normal people in Intermezzo,” Henry Oliver
What three out of five of the reviews in the “good” tier share is caring about Wittgenstein, which Oliver does, but he is further distinguished by taking up the question Rooney raises without answering, which is—is Ivan autistic, and if he is, why would it matter?
“Like a Prayer,” Ryan Ruby (New Left Review)
I value Ryan Ruby as a critic for many reasons, but among them that he has a clear and uncompromising sense of aesthetic value that is—not quite mine! But which I can follow through his pieces because he’s thinking so clearly.3 Anyway, here he takes Rooney’s use of Wittgenstein quite seriously and also talks about the religion angle which, as I’ve mentioned before, nobody ever does. (Including me, this time around.)
“Intermezzo,” Jessi Jezewska Stevens (4Columns)
I find the note of “Gen Z to save the day?” on which this piece ends a bit odd, but otherwise, it is, like Ruby’s, an engagement with what Rooney’s doing in the book that yields both qualified praise and criticism.
The Eh
“A Lover’s Theory of Marxism,” Andrea Long Chu (New York)
This piece is fine, I guess, but it has a “killing a mosquito with a sledgehammer” quality to it (or, since it’s a positive review, “praising a mosquito with a sledgehammer,” which would no doubt also kill the mosquito but let’s move on) maybe best exemplified by this pivot:
“And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person?” Margaret asks herself as Ivan kisses her. “Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
This question lies at the heart of the novel itself. In his 1914 study The Theory of the Novel, the Marxist literary theorist György Lukács argues that the bourgeois novel as it emerged in modern Europe featured a critical split between the hero’s interior life.…
To quote the American poet and intellectual David Byrne—how did I get here?
“Sally Rooney, Heart on Her Sleeve, Writes a Weeper,” Dwight Garner (The New York Times)
Something like three hundred words of this are spent on the “Sally Rooney backlash.” Why. No.
The ????
“Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo Feels Very Familiar,” Marianela D’Aprile
Culture writing in Jacobin… an endless mystery… fascinating… beyond my judgment.
The Ugly
“A wish-fulfilment romance,” Claire Lowdon
This one went down a tier for the statement “there is a wider than usual gulf between the writer Rooney wants to be and the writer she actually is.” Is there a gap between her and the writer she wants to be or the writer other people want her to be…? Evidence suggests the latter.4
“The incel and the dreamboat,” Ann Manov (The TLS)
If you are going to make a large part of your argument that the book’s flaws are evident in its poorly drawn incel character—check, first, that he was supposed to be an incel. The answer might surprise you! (Ditto, “novel of ideas.”)
I think people are taking Sylvia’s inability to have intercourse at face value, like a doctor evaluates her every year and is like: no, sex still forbidden, have you ever considered being a nun. Hence the questioning, does Sally Rooney know people have sex in other ways, what kind of car accident would cause that anyway, etc.
When I read the book, though, I took it more as a combination of (1) being in pain all the time and (2) her pride. The first just means one is not very motivated to trial-and-error your way through sex in the first place. I at least don’t find the idea that you’d be in pain constantly after a bad car accident that hard to believe. But I don’t think anybody has any issue with her being in pain all the time, they have an issue with her flatly taking intercourse off the table for mysterious medical reasons, and then with intercourse, everything else. Which brings us to my reading of Sylvia as a prideful character.
Pride is certainly a motivating force in why she dumped Peter in the first place, basically attempting to preserve in amber their old relationship, in which they seemed to perfectly and frictionlessly fit one another. “If we had stayed together,” she says, “you would have ended up hating me, Peter. And if you had left me, I would have hated you.” She discusses her medical issues with almost nobody except Peter (and the sexual aspect exclusively with Peter). She doesn’t want Peter to see her when she’s in pain, and so on.
Sylvia’s interactions with Peter suggest to me that she so deeply resents any form of, to her, lesser intimacy that she cuts off the possibility of anything with anyone rather than figure out how to have a sexual relationship again. If a “sex life” for Sylvia can’t be spontaneous and instantly mutually satisfying, as it was when she was a teenager, she doesn’t want to have one at all. When they do eventually have sex-without-intercourse, she says “that was nice. If I had known it would be like that— I just always thought it would be so difficult.”
But when Peter tries to make the leap from that intimacy into a relationship, Sylvia reacts extremely badly:
Again she falls silent, for a longer time now, a long time. Then with a tremble in her voice she says slowly: I don’t see what more I can do for you. I’ve tried to be your friend, and for some reason you’ve been determined to humiliate me and hurt me. I don’t know why. Maybe deep down you really wish I was dead, and you’re trying to punish me because I’m not.
I don’t think Peter wishes she died… but there is somebody who views her life after the accident as a living death throughout the book: Sylvia. If Peter’s romantic and sexual pursuit of Sylvia has been humiliating and hurtful, why? Is it because it reminds her she cannot have what she wants on the terms she wants? Frankly, I do find the whole polyamorous solution at the end unconvincing (though we can simply put that down to my own monogamous tendencies) but I think it is arranged as much for Sylvia’s convenience as Peter’s… possibly more so.
I wish this was a joke.
The other reason I value him as a critic is because he’s nice to me. This is the easiest way to gain a star spot in the world of letters.
Also, while practically every review does this, even the ones I like, so this comment is not specific to Lowdon really, I would ask why everyone assumes that Peter’s internal monologue is ersatz James Joyce given that almost every contemporary Irish writer I’ve read writes like this sometimes. Of course there’s an implicit compliment in being compared to Joyce, even negatively, but Rooney is also working in a contemporary milieu.
Here are some examples of what I mean. First, Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians:
They bait me. Strip me a bit. Ask who and you’re young, why not see the world first? Shouldn’t actors see so many things? But I’m sure I have in the deep of my brain. Against my tick-tocking minus in life – books and films, fancied plays I’ll be in, men surely meet, New York taxis maybe run for in elegant heels. Shouldn’t these outweigh what dun school skirts there’s been in this bud of life I own? And lower too, just left unsaid, time when life was something else but I’ve understood a whole world, all remaining is To Do. Can they not see this print on me? Ho ho, they flock You’re all grown-up certainly but second speech, if you would?
Next, Anna Burns’s Milkman (the least mannered of these examples):
We’d had a fight about it, maybe-boyfriend and me, because the milkman was keeping up the pressure by continuing to highlight it, to make veiled threats, to count down time, to get his point over, basically: stop seeing the young guy or else. Again, he did this by mentioning maybe-boyfriend, then cars, then eldest sister whose husband – the one of her heart she didn’t marry and not the sex-addict gossip whom, out of grief, loss and despair she did marry – had been killed that time by that defender-of-the-state bomb. ‘Carbomb, wasn’t it?’ he’d say again. So it would be maybe-boyfriend. Then cars. Then sister. Then dead lover. Then carbombs. Then it was back to maybe-boyfriend till by the end his words were putting me in mind of Somebody McSomebody and his unrelenting stalk-talk.
Finally, sections of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting…
It’s only a ten-minute drive She went to the toilet before she left Still passing Creaghan’s it comes on her suddenly so strong she’s on the point of telling Dickie to turn the car around and take her back home but then thinks would she even make it back Should she just say to pull over let her run out to the grass My God That would be about right wouldn’t it On the side of the road with her knickers down and the whole town gawping at her as they pass That would about put the tin hat on it
At some point, this sort of writing is just another technique, much like free indirect speech, right? Am I being obtuse? (I am as always open to this possibility.) And obviously you don’t need to like Rooney or her use of the technique just because it’s common, you can say “well I like Anna Burns because she’s good and I don’t like Sally Rooney because she’s bad,” etc.
Oh—! The author of The Perfect! Her little dog must glow!
I've read the first few chapters and think the writing is great. The internal dialogue Peter chapters are superbly done. My main complaint about the book is an unfair ageism thing. As a 62 year old grandfather, I'm having a tough time with the world weary characters being early 30s and younger than two of my three children. And at 22 I was engaged to my wife of now 40 years. I think i'll return to it when I'm in more of a mood for youth. Maybe the book makes me feel old!