Intermezzo

Genre

Literary Fiction

Publisher

Faber & Faber

Publication year

2024

ISBN

9780571365463

Intermezzo follows two Irish brothers in the weeks after their father's death: Peter, a Dublin lawyer in his thirties, and Ivan, a socially awkward competitive chess player of twenty-two. Sally Rooney's fourth novel traces their strained relationship and their entanglements in love, including...

Grief exposes the fault lines between two brothers in Sally Rooney's fourth novel, her most tender and formally searching to date. Peter, a successful Dublin barrister, and Ivan, a reticent young chess prodigy, have never quite understood each other; their father's death forces them into proximity and into new, complicating loves. Rooney writes desire and negotiation with her familiar precision, but Intermezzo widens her range - the prose loosens and fragments in Peter's sections, drawing on modernist rhythms to render a mind under strain. As ever she is interested in how tenderness survives inside relationships shadowed by money, age and self-doubt, and in the ethics of loving another person well. Readers who found her earlier novels cool may be surprised by the warmth here, the willingness to grant her characters grace. Intelligent, absorbing and quietly moving, it confirms Rooney as a novelist deepening rather than repeating herself, attentive as few contemporaries are to the ordinary difficulty of being kind.