Intermezzo
By Sally Rooney
Faber and Faber
ISBN: 9780571365470 
432pp.

Grief is an all-encompassing emotion that most of us are woefully ill-prepared to handle.

In a memoir titled Notes on Grief, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche views the experience of coping with loss as “a cruel kind of education.” Contrary to the popular perception of insights provided in the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ model, mourning isn’t a linear or systematic means of embracing the fact that we’ve lost people to the jaws of death. Instead, the grieving process is often chaotic and opens the floodgates to a surfeit of complex emotions.

Irish author Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo features two brothers who are deep in the throes of grieving and undergo a swift transformation in the weeks after their father’s demise. Coincidentally, both men seek solace in the cosy familiarity of romantic relationships, either as a distraction from their bereavement or a quest to rebuild their lives in the midst of a soul-crushing tragedy.

Grief has a way of upending old certainties and transforming people in unexpected ways. Peter, a Dublin-based lawyer in his thirties, finds himself hurtling through life at an expeditious, if not dangerous, pace. Once viewed as an indestructible force, he now relies on medication to sleep. However, sleep isn’t the only challenge that he has to reckon with. As he mourns his father’s death, Peter is caught between his abiding love for his first love, Slyvia, and his seemingly romantic yet transactional equation with a college student named Naomi.

Twenty-two-year-old Ivan has always been the antithesis of his smooth-talking older sibling. A veritable wallflower, he excels at playing competitive chess. As Ivan grapples with an unprecedented loss, Ivan takes an uncharacteristic step: he begins a relationship with an older woman named Margaret, who has her own demons to confront.

An Irish author’s novel about two brothers dealing with grief in their own ways and their relationship with each other offers some breathtaking insights on grieving as a life-altering experience

Much to their dismay, both brothers don’t find a confidante in each other. The age difference between them and the memory of past conflicts breeds suspicion in their hearts. Instead of being united by their collective grief, Peter and Ivan are pulled away for each other and lead fundamentally separate lives. They struggle to understand that the template of their relationship must change in light of an unbearable tragedy.

Rooney accounts for the chasm in the two brothers’ relationship by telling parallel stories. The novel alternates between chapters that offer glimpses into Peter and Ivan’s lives, respectively. This technique could have easily gone awry, if it had been carelessly executed. Rooney has been guilty of conflating the voices of her protagonists in her previous novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, wherein the emails written by two women characters seem indistinguishable from one another.

To avoid this blunder from being repeated, Rooney employs a close third-person perspective and also makes a conscientious effort to vary the tone of the chapters to match the characters’ psyches. As a result, readers are drawn into Peter’s troubled mind through a string of clipped sentences that lend a hasty, almost erratic quality to the narrative. Rooney’s style is far more fluid in the sections that deal with Ivan’s trajectory — a testament to his level-headedness. Ivan derives at least part of his surefootedness on rough terrain from his preoccupation with chess.

The title of Rooney’s novel is derived from the Italian name for an intermediate move in chess. As per this tactic, the player eschews the expected move and instead poses another threatening move that his/her opponent must respond to. The move comes through as an attempt to distract one’s adversary. Rooney’s characters, too, are caught in this intermediary phase. At a time when they should be reuniting with one another to cope with their collective loss, the two brothers are locked in petty disagreements that have implications on their relationship.

In a similar vein, Peter finds himself wrestling with his unresolved feelings for Slyvia after an accident renders her incapable of being a suitable romantic partner to him. His prolonged entanglement with Slyvia inevitably prevents him from pursuing the predictable path of moving forward rather than dwelling on the past. Some readers might find the events in Peter’s life far more intriguing than those that Ivan has to deal with. This can be attributed to the fact that Peter’s traumas and insecurities have accumulated over several years, and are merely finding an emotional release following his father’s death.

Intermezzo offers breathtaking insights on grieving as a life-altering experience. One of Rooney’s characters placates another by asserting that “people aren’t themselves when they’re grieving.” At another point in the novel, death is described as an event that takes place but doesn’t instantly pass into amnesia. Loss, Rooney argues, “is only [just] beginning” after the event.

The epigraph to the novel includes a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Rooney has self-translated the quote from German as “but don’t you feel grief now [But aren’t you now playing chess].” The epigraph mirrors the psyche of the characters, who choose to distract themselves rather than mourning the loss of a parent.

That the second part of the quote appears in parentheses gives readers the impression that the events of the novel have an equally incidental quality. The two brothers’ journey towards confronting their pain will only begin once they recognise that they must be empathetic towards each other as they grapple with loss.

Intermezzo is arguably a lesson in intertextuality. The author has even included a three-page note at the end of the book, detailing the quotations she has seeded into her text. The novel seems to owe an artistic debt to the works of James Joyce, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth and Robert Hayden, among others.

At its core, Rooney’s new novel derives its creative thrust from the romantic liaisons cultivated by the characters. However, the author refrains from depicting love in superficial hues and insists on highlighting its knottier dimensions. Rooney’s focus remains on the problematic choices men make when they are dealing with the complexities of love.

In a persistent effort to examine Peter and Ivan’s viewpoints, the author often overlooks the sentiments of the women in their lives. Barring the perspective of Ivan’s girlfriend, Rooney doesn’t cast a revealing light on the thoughts and emotions of the other female characters, including the two women in Peter’s life. While this may be a deliberate decision that reflects his perpetual state of cluelessness, Intermezzo loses a crucial dimension through this act of authorial erasure.

When it was released in 2021, Beautiful World, Where Are You marked a radical departure from Rooney’s widely popular early novels. Some readers billed it a seminal, experimental piece and applauded the author for changing tack. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the author would write another experimental novel. Though not an ambitious text, Rooney’s new work is certainly a weighty one. Intermezzo could have benefitted from substantial trimming to strengthen its pace.

The reviewer is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Typically Tanya and No Funeral for Nazia.
X: @TahaKehar

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 1st, 2024