Seven years into her writing career, a new book by Sally Rooney is all but guaranteed to be an event.
Rooney, an Irish novelist, has been hailed as a voice of the millennial generation, a writer who can marshal the economic uncertainty and emotional precarity that haunt young adults into moving, thorny romances that question intimacy and the value of art. Her 2017 debut, “Conversations With Friends,” was followed by “Normal People” in 2019 and “Beautiful World, Where Are You” in 2021.
She has met both critical and commercial success. And with her increased profile came increased scrutiny: those who say her novels are smut thinly disguised by intellectual, refined prose. Or that, despite being written by a self-proclaimed Marxist, the sexual politics of her books can seem awfully retrograde.
Regardless, critics are largely positive on her latest novel, “Intermezzo,” about a pair of Irish brothers mourning the recent death of their father, and the women they both become entangled with. (Note: Several of the articles below are behind subscription paywalls.)
What did we say?
“Clearly this book is going to divide people,” writes our own Dwight Garner, who is very decidedly not divided in his enthusiasm for Rooney’s latest.
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.
What did she say to us?
While many reviewers have been sure to point out how “Intermezzo” is told primarily from the perspective of two men, as opposed to Rooney’s previous books, she told The Times’s David Marchese that it wasn’t an overly intentional choice.
Interestingly, the first voice that came to the page for me in this project was Margaret’s — the character who becomes entangled in Ivan’s life in the course of the book. It certainly wasn’t that I sat down thinking, I have to write a book where the male voice is central. I just felt my way through the story that seemed to emerge when I encountered these characters, which is what I always try to do.
She’s trying something new.
Laura Miller at Slate writes that this is “deeper territory for Rooney.”
While sadder and less of a page-turner than her three previous novels, “Intermezzo” is in many ways a more truthful book. As delicious as Rooney’s earlier love stories have been, they tend to conclude with a tidiness that defies reality. It’s very rarely the case that two people finally becoming a couple will solve most of their problems, and loss inevitably waits around each of life’s corners. “Intermezzo” is the work of an artist who is continually trying out new techniques and continually growing, but in a direction that might inspire fewer bucket hats, tote bags and Netflix adaptations. Perhaps not all of her current fans will follow her there, but the ones who do won’t regret it.
Alexandra Harris at The Guardian writes that, stylistically, this is very much a Rooney book.
“Intermezzo” is an accomplished continuation of the writing that made Rooney a global phenomenon. It’s also more philosophically ambitious, stylistically varied, disturbing at times and altogether stranger.
Lillian Fishman at The Washington Post was impressed by the novel’s stylistic leap from the author’s previous three books.
In fact, everything about this novel — its style, theme, length — shows less ruthless restraint than Rooney’s previous books. Poetry and emotion overspill their containers.
Johanna Thomas-Corr at The Sunday Times was gripped by the brothers at the story’s center.
Rooney knows what men look like when they are faltering and foolish. The explosive arguments between Peter and Ivan, in which one knee-jerk judgment breaks the fall of another, are among the most masterly scenes she has written. You can smell the fear.
Amy Weiss-Meyer at The Atlantic sees the book’s “emphasis on aging” as “a reflection of the evolving millennial group-consciousness.”
But something big has shifted here. The main players in Rooney’s first two novels were college-age, busy wondering when their real life would start; even the protagonists of “Beautiful World,” approaching 30, asked earnestly what kind of person they wanted to be. Rooney’s latest characters, newly alert to the weight of years, are as attuned to regret as to anticipation; they’re preoccupied with what kind of person they have already been. Looking more warily in the mirror, they don’t always like what they see.
And yet.
“The novel’s insistence on a mood of ethical and intellectual refinement can feel claustrophobic and precious,” writes James Marriott at The Times of London.
The reader is never quite able to shake the suspicion that Rooney’s characters have all been made to sign contracts holding them to high standards of personal conduct before they are permitted to appear on the page. Such moral ambiguity as the novel can bring itself to contain is dispiritingly slight, and often takes place safely offstage.
Joanna Biggs at The London Review of Books takes Rooney to task for her overly plain prose, among other things.
Rooney’s reputation as a prodigy has the effect of drawing attention to the less successful elements in her books. The first of these is the leniency with which she treats her characters, and which often results in improbably happy endings.
Alexandra Harris, at The Guardian, took issue with the role that one female character — who is no longer sexually active as a result of chronic pain following an accident — plays in the novel.
Sylvia is still charismatically alive, and Peter still deeply attracted to her, but he thinks grimly of their relationship as “mutilated by circumstance into something illegible.” The end of her sexual life is cast, in some of the novel’s most troubling passages, as tantamount to death. We find little counter to the notion that Sylvia is a broken sex provider who cannot offer him fulfillment.
Got it. But has anyone written a piece exploring the way in which romance and Marxism intertwine?
In a lengthy critical essay at Vulture, Andrea Long Chu explores all of Rooney’s work and establishes a grand theory.
Over and over, Rooney’s characters put their faith in love as a means of escape from the conventional roles assigned to them by society and by each other; no sooner have they achieved this than they are rudely confronted with inequalities of wealth, status and power that are clearly fatal to their idealism — but not to love itself. I take this to be the modest provocation of Rooney’s novels: the idea that love is real precisely because it is a product, one created by social conventions, by market forces, by systems of violence and, behind all of this, by human beings themselves. This is not, I admit, a Marxist theory of love. It is something more unexpected: a lover’s theory of Marxism.
The post What Are People Saying About the New Sally Rooney Book? appeared first on New York Times.
