Art by Izzy Walter
Sally Rooney’s new book wriggles under new (and old) constraints.
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Three months ago, advance copies of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo were selling on eBay for over two hundred pounds. Guarded globally with the same caution as a protected species, the overwhelmingly-anticipated book responds to its captivity as a commodity with some netting of its own. When Margaret, an older woman, sleeps with Ivan, a younger chess prodigy, for the first time, she finds ‘[s]he has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life’. But having slept with this younger man, ‘Life has slipped free of its netting’.
This net is a grid of social expectations of her, her past relationships, and her unconventional position as over a decade older than Ivan. In fact, if you have read a couple of Rooney’s novels, you’ll recognise the very texture of this net. These socially transgressive relationships that work against the net of ‘ordinary life’ enable Rooney to confine and isolate her characters away from the public eye. In a 2019 interview, Sheila Heti noted this formula, describing her range of ‘inappropriate’ relationships, whether it be the popular boy and the bookish girl in Normal People (2018), the younger woman and the married man in Conversations with Friends (2017), the orphaned adolescent and her handsome guardian in her short story Mr Salary (2019), or the literary star and the warehouse worker in Beautiful World Where Are You (2021). These unlikely alliances form the backbone of her plots, creating social obstacles for the characters but also, crucially, ensuring their captivity. By initiating unconventional relationships, Rooney forces her characters’ romances to operate in closed, clandestine settings. Sheltered from the social and cultural expectations of transactions in modern relationships, the characters may nurture love in privacy. This is, at least, what she summarises to Heti.
Intermezzo sticks to the formula. Recent grad Ivan falls in love with an older, married-but-it’s-complicated woman Margaret, limiting their interactions to Margaret’s secluded cottage, where Ivan notes ‘I could have got a taxi, but I guess with the town being so small, the driver might know your house’. Alternately, his thirty-something hotshot lawyer brother Peter finds himself enmeshed with a university student and part-time sex worker, Naomi, who is not invited but rather smuggled into his house, asking mockingly ‘What if your cleaner sees me, would you not be mortified?’. Stakes established, spaces closed and secured, Rooney makes the intermezzo move, where just like the eponymous chess trick, she forces her character to respond protectively to social threats.
While Rooney’s response to Heti’s locked room proposition is to defend it as an anti-capitalist shield against a world obsessed with social currency, in fact, their isolation only renders the characters more dependent on each other’s services. Margaret must drive Ivan back and forth from the station to her house, and Peter pays for Naomi’s bills. Giving does not only transfer power but makes one submissive. In Conversations, the ‘pathologically submissive’ Nick tells Frances that ‘helplessness was often a way of exercising power.’ In her latest book, Rooney’s elder protagonist reflects a similar dynamic, in which exploitation occurs between ‘He, her, financially, sexually. Or she him, financially, emotionally. It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it.’ By separating and isolating her couples, Rooney does not escape the capitalist world, but replicate it in miniature. Immediately after her brief police holding, Naomi asks Peter for a new phone so she can go on ‘recording some interminable voice note for her friends’. The net is also, in millennial terms, the internet.
The net doubles to encompass two unlikely net-mates: social restriction and human interdependence. Remembering their first encounter in which she assumed ‘life had slipped free of its netting’ so that ‘the netting itself had all along been an illusion’ Margaret realises this idea ‘could not contain or describe the borderless all-enveloping reality of life’. The netting is more than the social norms of a capricious capitalism, but a fundamental human fabric. Or perhaps, as Rooney suggests, those two are not so different. The net is stretchy; it does not contain but is innate to each particular person. Total interdependence. As Bobbi emails Frances in Conversations: ‘To love someone under capitalism you have to love everyone’.
Beneath thin strings and large holes, Rooney’s characters learn to grow within their captivity. Rooney often complains about the bourgeois origins of the novel and her reservations, for what seems like the first time, are realised in the novel’s formal experimentation. Intermezzo’s loose, free indirect style and stream-of-conscious voices soar above Rooney’s characteristically flat prose. In alternating chapters, Peter walks around Dublin in a Xanax-induced Joycean daydream seeing:
Scenery of old romances, drunken revelries. Four in the morning getting sick there outside the Mercantile, remember that. Scholarship night. Young then. Mixing memory and desire. Dark remembered walkways. Graveyard of youth.
The multiplicity of voices enables Rooney to work towards a loose collective consciousness, a union between character, writer, and reader. Peter’s voice interrupts a loose third person: ‘[e]ven smile at other men sometimes. Differently. No, you don’t. He does if there’s a reason […] Smiles, yes.’ Here, like in the former fractured syntax, Rooney glides between an unconscious character seeing and experiencing the world to a conscious second-person character forming judgements from that world and then a narratorial voice, subtly evaluating the character from a third-person perspective. At worst this reads like an anxious Modernist Twitter bot, at best it reads like pure theatre, full of voices interrupting each other and charging about on the page. Earlier this year, Rooney spoke to the New York Times, suggesting ‘I sometimes feel like my life might be a little like that of an actor. I get into the character’s consciousness, and that allows me to write about what it is that the character is undergoing.’ Beyond attempting to resist the imposed relationship between artist and art, it demonstrates a shift from her previous novels that gathers this new writing closest to dramatic monologue. Even more, Peter’s chapters take on a neglected sense of her title: alongside the chess move, intermezzo also refers to a comic or musical interlude in theatre – an intrusion of a separate genre. Like it or hate it, the loose stream of consciousness is her most ambitious formal attempt at staging a collective human fabric.
The net that holds these characters together becomes so all-encompassing as to be imperceptible. Our interdependence is so natural that plot problems do not result in a lack of connection between characters, but simply in the inability to translate or understand each other separately. In fact, this instability between narrative voices, between corporeal action and compulsive self-criticism manifests in an inability to interpret each other that leads to inevitable misunderstanding. Ivan, who is described as possibly autistic, often finds himself a ‘frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures’ he cannot understand. Both central characters struggle to apply the understood meaning and structures of their work (law and chess) onto the appearance of the world, be it a rogue emoji or a long, uninterpretable look.
And there’s a lot of looking: from Ivan’s ‘quiet, searching looks’, his ‘big intelligent eyes looking back at you, uncomprehending’, to Peter, who ‘looks at him across the table with such a funny expression – hurt, and at the same time baffled and kind of alarmed’. In their closed spaces the struggles arise when the visual is the only way out of themselves and into the other. When looking doesn’t bring revelation, (unlike in Normal People, for instance, where ‘[h]e looked up at her, directly, with total attention. She knew he was going to kiss her, and he did.’) In Intermezzo, Peter is baffled by the sexual implications of ‘that guy online who posts the peach emoji under all [Naomi’s] pictures’ or the tactical frivolity of her friend saying ‘well we’re homeless but otherwise 100 […] The 100 emoji’. Language is disrupted by visuals, laying down covert intentions that the brothers find hard to read. This, too, is part of the narrative obstacle course that Rooney imposes on her quite reasonable and morally fine people. If eyes had threads coming out of them, then Intermezzo would be a tapestry.
But what fixes the problem of looking? What does Sally Rooney turn to in characters’ meandering misunderstandings? Touch! Later, after an argument Ivan asks Margaret, ‘[a]re you looking at me?’ and then ‘[i]n what way?’. She sighs, he kisses her and ‘nothing else needed to be said’. Ultimately, it is contact with the body that eases the problem of looking in Rooney’s books. It is not just that we should read, but we should feel. In a 2022 lecture on Ulysses, Rooney writes that the magic of the novel is ‘its ability to involve us emotionally in the relationships of its protagonists,’ finding herself ‘extraordinarily moved’ by Molly’s relationship with Bloom, ‘what they say and don’t say and can’t say to one another’. The failures of looking and speaking are solved by touch. In Normal People, Connell reflects how their digital ‘relationship has been captured in a complex network of state power’, while on the final page of Conversations, Frances reflects on ‘taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about […] A complex network of objects and concepts’. Much later, in Intermezzo, Rooney responds. Margaret realises that life has not ‘slipped free of its netting’, but that ‘there is no such life, slipping free: life itself is the netting, holding people in place’. These cryptic networks and social complexities are just people, holding onto one another. The isolated spaces of their early relationships are not ideals but obstacles for her characters to escape from, into each other’s arms.
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