Give Sally Rooney credit for not sticking with a safe formula. Her first three novels have made her an international literary celebrity whose book launches come festooned with branded merch and pop-up stores and breathless articles imparting whatever morsels of info her publisher doles out months in advance of a new book’s release. Both Conversations With Friends, her debut, and Normal People, its follow-up, have been adapted for television. Though judging from the comments under those breathless articles it’s more or less become a cliché to complain that you think her books are boring or trivial, millions of readers find them utterly irresistible. Nevertheless, with her fourth novel, Intermezzo, Sally Rooney is trying something very different.

The classic Rooney heroine is a bookish, slightly awkward young woman struggling with a passionate but challenging romance. Heralded as the chronicler of uniquely millennial experiences, Rooney writes what are in truth old-fashioned novels about love and friendship, not so very different from Middlemarch or Persuasion, when you get right down to it. The powerful narrative momentum she kindles has always centered around couples and whether they will get, and stay, together, often in defiance of toxic families, superficial friends, and social pressure.

Intermezzo, on the other hand, is about two brothers: Ivan, in his early 20s, and Peter, older by a decade. As the title suggests, the novel describes an interlude, a brief period of crisis that will transform the brothers’ relationship forever: Their filial bond, already thinned by long-held resentments and misunderstanding, is now further tested by the death of Ivan and Peter’s father.

<section data-uri="slate.com/_components/product/instances/cm1aux7hx000h0im3fututdc6@published" class="product " data-product-name="Intermezzo” data-product-price=”$26.97″>

Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page.
Thank you for your support.

Though a casual reader (or dismisser) of Rooney might think all her books are the same, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, Rooney’s previous novel, was itself an experiment, with a dual narration style departing from its more straightforward predecessors. The two female main characters—close friends, but separated geographically, and each, yes, involved in her own complicated love affair—exchange emails sharing their thoughts and feelings, and these missives alternate with chapters written in the third person describing characters’ behavior exclusively from the outside. In that novel, Rooney tells us what people do in detail without revealing what’s going on within, leaving the reader to guess their motivations (or, as often as not, their rationalizations). This divide between stated values and behavior has increasingly fascinated Rooney. In Beautiful World, Alice, a novelist, talks and writes constantly about her leftist political beliefs, while acknowledging that she doesn’t really act on them. The same could be said of Frances, the main character in Rooney’s debut, Conversations With Friends, though Alice is more self-aware of this classic millennial conundrum. She finds her own writing “morally and politically worthless,” while admitting, “it’s what I do with my life, the only thing I want to do.”

That divide between what you believe and how you behave is one of the great themes of Intermezzo. In a pivotal confrontation between the brothers, Ivan—who as a teenager once fell down the rabbit hole of the red-pill internet, but is now quite sweet—tells Peter that “conduct is more important than beliefs.” This stings, as Peter, a human rights barrister, wants nothing more than “to be right, to be once and for all proven right,” yet reproaches himself for being involved with two women at the same time. One, Sylvia, a literature professor, is his ex and, he believes, the love of his life. Their once perfect relationship hit the rocks after a car accident left Sylvia in chronic pain and in some obscure way disabled. She broke up with Peter because, as she puts it, “what most people are talking about, when they talk about sex,” is “not something I can do anymore. Not in any kind of normal way, or not without a lot of pain.” Still devoted to her, Peter accompanies Sylvia to doctor appointments and on long walks where they talk about 18^th-century prose forms and the need for an “erotics of environmentalism.” Meanwhile, he sleeps with and gives money to a woman his brother’s age.

In contrast to his popular, successful older brother, Ivan, a chess prodigy, has never had a girlfriend until he meets Margaret, the director of a provincial arts center, while playing an exhibition game against 10 opponents. They fall in love, but Margaret insists on keeping the relationship secret because she can’t bear to become the object of gossip in her village. The small portion of Intermezzo told from Margaret’s perspective serves to emphasize both how difficult she and Ivan initially find it to communicate and how oppressed she is by the conventionality of small-town life, much as Peter fears being perceived as an oddball by his colleagues. Margaret, however, is no defiant misfit like Marianne in Normal People. She’s older, for one, and her failed marriage and inability to disregard what neighbors think of her have ground her down. Separated from her alcoholic husband, Margaret has carefully built her local image as “a fine strong woman. For that alone, how many people hated her. And would relish her humiliation now at last it had come. Indecent, sordid, making a show of herself. No wonder that husband of hers took to the drink.”

When Margaret and Ivan first sleep together, she wakes up to find he’s left her alone in bed and tells herself, “Well, that’s what boys his age like to do at weekends. Why not with her?” She’s completely wrong about this. Ivan is just in the shower, and regards her with an awestruck reverence moderated by his awareness that, unlike Peter, he doesn’t know how to interact effortlessly with others, especially women.

We know all this because Intermezzo—unlike Beautiful World—offers its readers full access to its main characters’ thoughts and feelings. Because of this, we can see how they perpetually misunderstand each other. The kernel of the brothers’ estrangement lies in just such a misinterpretation. Peter, determined to be perceived as both a white knight and one of life’s winners, is revealed (in chapters of agitated, fragmented sentences stripped of grammatical subjects) to be teetering on the brink of fatal darkness. “Just to think, or not even think, but to overhear the words inside his own head,” runs this internal monologue. “Strange relief like a catch released: I wish. Deepest and most final of desires. Something bitter in it too, luxuriously bitter, yes. And why not. Why doesn’t he, that is, if the idea is so consoling. Oh, for other people, of course: to protect them. Other people prefer you to suffer.”

The book’s cover, with its chessmen arranged on a board just so, encourages us to interpret “Intermezzo” additionally as a chess term, “an unexpected move that poses a severe threat and forces an immediate response.” The death of Ivan and Peter’s gentle father is just such a disruption, jarring the brothers out of their habitual patterns, exposing Ivan’s capacity for love and Peter’s fear of it. Many of Rooney’s abiding themes emerge in this novel: the ruinous fear of being seen as ridiculous and not “normal,” the unsettling way the polarity of power in a relationship can reverse itself, the potential for erotic intimacy to transcend the barriers between people. But because the central relationship in the novel isn’t a romantic one, the result is a work that feels very different from its predecessors. For all her dispassionate assessment of contemporary mores, her almost dour frankness, Rooney’s novels have always been founded in a belief in true love—in the notion that all can be resolved if only a man and a woman can figure out how to choose to stay together.

Siblings, on the other hand, can’t help being bound to each other; it’s just the quality of that connection that’s in play. This doesn’t make the suffering of Ivan and Peter less moving or profoundly conveyed. To the contrary. Cooking dinner, remembering a meal he once cooked for his father, Ivan feels a piercing desire “to say and hear the words again, that can never again be said or heard. To return to the house once more, and not find it dark and empty, but airy and bright again with open windows. To spend an afternoon together, playing with the dog, eating dinner, doing nothing, only being together, just once more.” Anyone who’s lost a beloved parent will recognize that pang.

A novel about grief, however powerful, will always lack the narrative drive of a novel about true love, thwarted and then ultimately validated. (All of Rooney’s novels have had happy endings.) There’s no “Sally Rooney girl” at the center of Intermezzo for readers to identify with and root for. Some other aspects of the novel are puzzling, and perhaps a bit contrived: Why does no one seem to recognize that Ivan is neurodivergent? Why can’t Peter and Sylvia at least try to get past her apparent inability to have intercourse? But the most striking quality of Intermezzo is its lack of that old reliable engine of hope and possibility that gave her first three novels their addictive quality.

This is new and deeper territory for Rooney, who has always seemed highly ambivalent toward her own celebrity, as Alice’s loathing for the PR image of herself in Beautiful World indicates: “I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me.” While sadder and less of a page-turner than her three previous novels, Intermezzo is in many ways a more truthful book. As delicious as Rooney’s earlier love stories have been, they tend to conclude with a tidiness that defies reality. It’s very rarely the case that two people finally becoming a couple will solve most of their problems, and loss inevitably waits around each of life’s corners. Intermezzo is the work of an artist who is continually trying out new techniques and continually growing, but in a direction that might inspire fewer bucket hats, tote bags, and Netflix adaptations. Perhaps not all of her current fans will follow her there, but the ones who do won’t regret it.