Intermezzo review

Intermezzo is Sally Rooney's fourth novel, following two brothers in Dublin in the months after their father's death. Peter Korellis is a thirty-two-year-old barrister who has never recovered from a breakup with his college girlfriend Sylvia, now his closest friend and still partially his lover, while also sleeping with and falling in love with Naomi, a twenty-three-year-old in a difficult situation. Ivan Korellis is twenty-two, a chess prodigy who begins a relationship with Margaret, a thirty-six-year-old woman recently widowed, that neither of them knows how to categorize. The novel alternates between the brothers with different narrative techniques and watches both relationships form, falter, and press against the question of what people owe each other.

The title is a chess term — the intermezzo or zwischenzug, an in-between move that disrupts an expected sequence. Rooney uses it to describe the moment the novel occupies: between a death and whatever comes after it, between one kind of life and the next. Grief is not the book's explicit subject but it saturates everything — the brothers' inability to speak to each other, Peter's drug use, Ivan's sudden willingness to risk something real. Both men are trying to feel something that doesn't hurt.