A new Sally Rooney novel is an event, given the phenomenal success of her books to date, especially Normal People, and the adaptation of both it and her debut, Conversations with Friends, for television.
Intermezzo, her fourth novel, is published by Faber & Faber on Tuesday but many major reviews have already been published. Here is a selection of the most interesting, followed by highlights of her conversation with Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole last Saturday in Dublin’s National Concert Hall.
What the critics said
Putting sex on the page is a high-risk enterprise. Parody is the always unwelcome guest at the feast of the flesh. It is no small part of Rooney’s achievement in her latest novel that she portrays physical desire with tact and tenderness, without giving in to soft-focus sentimentalism ... Rooney’s particular genius lies in a kind of conversational drama where her characters tease out every facet of a predicament ... This bold, adventurous and captivating novel is a major addition to a body of work that never fails to surprise and engage. – Michael Cronin, The Irish Times
Readers who were flummoxed by the digressive longueurs of her last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, will welcome Intermezzo as a return to form; its forensic focus on interpersonal dynamics is closer in spirit to Normal People and Conversations with Friends ... Rooney’s first two novels were notable for their brisk pacing and taut, compact structure. Intermezzo is bigger and baggier; it has the heft and density of a more serious work, but the characters aren’t quite compelling enough to warrant such treatment. – Houman Barekat, Sunday Independent
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On finishing, I reflected: what would it be to hold a book with a soul? I felt I had. I felt changed, and utterly the same, the way it feels to read Larkin, or Tolstoy; felt, that for the time spent reading Intermezzo, I had gone more deeply into the world, reattuned to its networked thrum of pleasures, miseries, worries, and erotics that I might already have been aware of – but dully. Sublime literature will do this for you. Any reader who cares to revisit Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World sequentially will find them striving towards that goal, each book more confident than the last, slightly less guarded in its pursuit. Here at last, we see Sally Rooney discovering the full potential of her prowess: to attend finely to the world around her, to find love in its every complexity having done so, to offer those findings sincerely to others. – Jo Hamya, The Independent
Intermezzo is a frighteningly astute novel, and somehow it does not feel overlong at 437 pages ... The philosophical rigour behind the book in no way impedes on it being incarnated in human consciousnesses: indeed, it depends upon the bodily. Rooney writes – and I write this rarely – extremely well about desire and sex, not in a manner that is as such erotic, but rather complex, conflicted, aghast and shy ... Moreover, there is something profoundly uplifting about being able to recommend a novel wholeheartedly and say “this is what this form and this form alone is still able to do”. – Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
Sally Rooney’s fourth novel is not exactly her best, nor likely to be her best loved ... But if Intermezzo is not Rooney’s juiciest novel, it is her meatiest. The thickness of the book – her first to exceed 400 pages – is a clue that it will not resemble the sleek vehicles for sexual tension that made her famous. Intermezzo lacks the taut self-assurance of Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), but it is an honourable, tenacious and not unsuccessful attempt to go beyond them, and to leave – indeed to run some distance from – her formal comfort zone ...
With Intermezzo, Rooney has tried to deepen her fiction, and has thrown herself at her task with enough conviction and skill to exorcise the initial self-consciousness that accompanies so conspicuous a departure. In doing so, she earns the liberties she takes, making good use of the freedoms afforded by extreme success, including the freedom to be a bit less remarkable. – Lola Seaton, New Statesman
At the heart of Rooney’s characterisation is a quality that can pull both ways: her fondness for brilliance. It’s engrossing and impressive, mostly – until it tips into a flaw ... And yet, while it occasionally overpowers the narrative, that intelligence gives Intermezzo its coherence and structure – even its underlying philosophy. The counterpointed views, the narrative focus, the compelling style of prose: they’re different means of giving fictional events their undeniable force. For all the griefs and regrets in this novel, all the misreadings and mistakes, as the characters try to figure out what they feel, we never lose sight of their capacity for love. If Rooney’s work has a guiding belief, I think it’s something such as this: no one is ever truly alone. Some might see that as obvious, a truism. Others would call it a reason to live. – Cal Revely-Calder, The Telegraph
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“Intermezzo sees Rooney return to exceptional form with a novel as clever as her 2017 debut Conversations with Friends, and as engrossing as its 2018 follow-up Normal People ... characters rendered in a kind of literary pointillism, interiorities that feel so real they vibrate, inwardness turned utterly out. In Intermezzo, her usually spare style meets something more impressionistic. Internal monologue, often ungrammatical, almost staccato, merges with external dialogue, sliding between sensation, quotation and conversation, forming a picture of an inner life that is persuasive and eminently readable. – Shahidha Bari, Financial Times
Her most mature and moving book to date ... It marks a departure for Rooney, who has evolved from a writer of dialogue-driven romance stories to richly layered, expansive novels about fractured families and people experimenting with unconventional relationship dynamics ... By the final pages my eyes were red and swollen. I read it in a state of rapture – and relief. By rediscovering what the one thing the novel uniquely excels at – inwardness – Rooney shows she can tune into her characters’ thoughts and catch them in the act of realising important things about themselves. Her work is much better for it. – Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times
Such moral problems as are permitted to Intermezzo’s characters are puzzled over with a conscientiousness that – over the length of more than 400 pages – can seem prissy ... The same inhibiting fastidiousness marks Rooney’s prose. At its best her writing is distinguished by its deadpan ironies and subtle responsiveness to the intonations of 21st-century speech. In previous books Rooney sympathised with her characters’ earnestness even as she adroitly ironised it ... Intermezzo feels too blithely endorsing of its protagonists’ pretensions ...
For all its flaws, Intermezzo is scattered with the little gifts of psychological and emotional observation that are the most cherishable aspects of Rooney’s talent. Characters condemned to lifeless perfection in the hagiographic passages of authorial description can suddenly jump up and live the moment they start speaking or thinking. – James Marriott, The Times
Sally Rooney on sex scenes: ‘It would save me a lot of embarrassment if I could simply write: ‘Afterwards comma’’
There has likely never been as great a number of patrons with bookshop-branded tote bags on their arm in the National Concert Hall as there were on Saturday night when the auspicious venue hosted a conversation with Sally Rooney.
Rooney took to the stage wearing an austere grey skirt and blazer combination with a low-heeled court shoe, not that it matters, but as a no-photo rule was in place, it’s necessary to paint a picture.
Addressing the crowd from the rostrum first in Irish, the celebrated author’s Trinity debating days were clearly still serving her well. She was visibly moved at the audience reaction to her and looked to be taking in the room with her hand on her heart.
Before reading from her new novel Intermezzo – pronounced Inter-met-zo – Rooney took a few moments to speak about the “broader context” within which we were assembled in Dublin, urging the crowd to keep calling for an end to the “unfolding genocide” in Palestine, adding with a quiver in her voice, “it is the least we can do”.
She then performed an animated reading from the first chapter of the novel before she was joined on stage by Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole where the greeted each other with a hug like old friends.
O’Toole started the conversation by saying he first heard of the job of “intimacy co-ordinator” in reference to the television adaptation of Normal People and suggested it would be a good title for Rooney herself as her writing “maps the co-ordinates of human intimacy with accuracy and grace.”
Later the conversation was steered towards the author’s prowess when it comes to writing sex scenes in particular, which can so often appear stilted and cliche in literature. This set Rooney’s foot bobbing a little awkwardly, but true to form she provided a comprehensive response nonetheless.
It would save me a lot of embarrassment if I could simply write: “Afterwards comma,” she said to a big laugh.
But for the characters to come alive for her and for the reader, Rooney said, “I sometimes have to go with them.”
It’s necessary to allow the reader to understand why two characters are drawn together “[it’s] what makes them care about each other so intensely. Desire is an important part of that.”
Asked by an audience member how she balances staying true to her own voice while meeting the expectation of readers, Rooney said she has thus far been “touched” by how her readers have been “prepared to come with me”. It is only late in the process when worries about the reception to her work creeps in, such as now, at a live event before its release, she said, sending a laugh up from the auditorium.
Towards the end of the evening in which many facets of Rooney’s oeuvre were dissected – from the novel as a form to language and power dynamics in relationships – O’Toole and Rooney got on to the subject of how the instability of renting and housing is a backdrop in Intermezzo, about which she explained it is part of the reality for her characters and that, essentially, she doesn’t set out to make an ideological statements in her work. As a Marxist, she said, it is important to be faithful to her beliefs in her fiction, but not to impart them.
Of Intermezzo,Rooney said, “[It] comes down on the side of life, of living” and if she could pass that sentiment on to one reader, “I feel it was worth writing.”
