A Sally Rooney backlash, in certain quarters, has been building. Her books are too white, it is said, and her politics too soft. She can be, in pursuit of a love story, a bit corny — or so it is said.
Her success rankles. Midnight release parties are scheduled in many bookstores for her new novel, “Intermezzo,” as if it were “Harry Potter,” Book 8. These parties may be cheerful communal events for some. For others, they are deeply uncool.
Asked once about his ambition, the novelist Peter De Vries replied that he yearned for a mass audience large enough for his elite audience to despise. Rooney, who is Irish, has reached this tricky plateau. She’s been called the Salinger of the Snapchat generation. She does less publicity than most other writers, yet she seems curiously overexposed.
I’ve had a small, personal taste of the Rooney backlash. The advance word about “Intermezzo” has not been good, at least among publishing’s smart young crowd. I’ve heard it called overlong and undercooked.
When I’ve replied that I admire “Intermezzo” almost without reservation — I fell into it like a goose-down comforter after a 15-mile hike in the sleet — the reaction has largely been disbelief. Some were as apoplectic as parrots. If I had to boil down the responses to my declarations of love to three letters, they’d be “LOL.”
Clearly this book is going to divide people.
“Intermezzo” is about two brothers, Peter, a successful barrister in Dublin, and Ivan, who is shyer, geekier, 10 years younger, wears ceramic braces and plays competitive chess. They are mourning the death of their father, and there is lingering bitterness between them. Our perceptions of Peter and Ivan will shift quite radically over the course of the novel, the way they do about the foster brothers in Martin Amis’s early novel “Success.”
Anyone who has read Rooney’s previous work — notably the novels “Conversations With Friends” (2017), about two college friends who become entwined in the lives of a married couple, and “Normal People” (2018), about the class and status differences between a pair of young lovers — is aware that her primary subject is love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it. She writes as well about this topic as anyone alive. It’s as if she were Iris Murdoch or Edna O’Brien with a three-book deal at Harlequin Romance.
Peter, 32, is caught between two women. Sylvia, his longtime girlfriend, left him after she was gravely and permanently injured in a car crash; she didn’t want Peter to have to care for her. He remains dismayed by her decision, and they remain close. He has a younger and more feral lover, Naomi, who is 22 and borderline homeless. At the start, he doesn’t take this relationship seriously.
Rooney is attentive to physical beauty. “Milky white his skin, and his figure slender and beautiful as a Grecian marble,” she writes about Ivan. Here is Naomi, in a few sketches: “Full lips parted, sweep of freckles on her cheekbone. Silver stud glinting in her ear”; “tiny silver dress”; “animal intelligence”; “pink tongue, flash of silver.” Rooney underscores her “supreme desirability.”
The overriding love story in this wise, resonant and witty novel is between Ivan, who is 22, and Margaret, a 36-year-old arts-program director he meets at a chess event. She fears the social repercussions of dating a much younger man. They skulk around, hoping to avoid being seen together.
She feels like Humberta Humberta. In writing about an older woman with a younger man, Rooney is working in the tradition of Colette, Zoe Heller and Annie Ernaux, among others.
Ivan and Margaret’s mutual attraction — they feel they belong to “the same camp,” a phrase that is repeated — is a revelation to both. She blossoms under his touch and he under hers.
“It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love,” Raymond Carver famously wrote. Rooney’s writing about love hits as hard as it does because she is especially adept at evoking loneliness, for which love is a salve. There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea.
“Intermezzo” wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s a mature, sophisticated weeper. It makes a lot of feelings begin to slide around in you. I mentioned Murdoch: Although Rooney’s supply of imagery and symbolism is more limited, they share a mad intellectual intensity. I recognize Rooney in lines like this one, from Murdoch’s novel “A Severed Head” (1961): “I would come to her even if I had to wade through blood.”
Like O’Brien in her early stories and novels, Rooney recognizes the life-changing importance of physical contact, of sex. Sleeping with Margaret, Ivan finds himself asking: Is this how it feels, to get what you want?
In bed with Peter, young Naomi shares her desire for rough sex, for abasement. “You can do whatever you want with me,” she tells him. The only song lyric slipped into this book is unattributed (it’s from Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games”): “I heard that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?”
The desire to be bossed around in bed has appeared in Rooney’s earlier fiction. Peter complies with Naomi’s request, but tender harm is not quite his thing. “Look, it’s different for your generation,” he says. “You’re all going around getting strangled and spitting in each other’s mouths or whatever. I’m 32, OK, we’re normal.”
This is a chess book without much chess in it. But when Rooney does turn her attention to the game, the writing is fluid and exact:
When a move suggests itself to him for no obvious reason, he need only apply the slightest pressure to his intuition, a few seconds or minutes of conscious calculation, in order to feel the strength of the intuition asserting itself forcefully in response: Because after the exchange, for instance — forcing his opponent to withdraw the rook and then taking with the pawn on g5, exposing the light-squared bishop, trading, after all that — then white’s knight will be trapped.
Is “Intermezzo” overlong? I would not have wanted it shorter; Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading. Is it pandering? Perhaps, a bit. By the end, there were more tears in her characters’ eyes than there were in my own.
Yet this book charmed and moved me, and, over the two or three days I spent with it, made my burdens feel lighter. Anthony Bourdain was always exhorting his audience to live, live! In one of his arias on this topic, he advised us to “Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce.”
“Intermezzo” is Sally Rooney with a bit more butter and cream. Yes, please, waiter. Call me a fool for love, but this oft-jaundiced reader found this meal to be discerning, fattening, old-school and delicious.
The post Sally Rooney, Heart on Her Sleeve, Writes a Weeper appeared first on New York Times.
