Rooney, Austen, Joyce, 'Intermezzo'

I finally get around to Sally Rooney's latest novel

The duty of a novelist is first and foremost to bring pleasure to readers; if Sally Rooney succeeds, it is because she understands this duty. In the 19th century, the best novels—those of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, etc.—understood our instinctive pleasure in following the lives of two or three or a handful of characters, delineated with care, textured with detail, peppered with virtues and with faults, not always likable but usually sympathetic, into whose lives we would be drawn, relating their experiences to our own, feeling with them, wanting to know the outcomes of their situations, the choices they would make, the decisions they would land on, to see in a shimmering web the relations between people, the feelings tragically unspoken, the feelings unfortunately spoken, the social mores broached or abided by, character revealed in a chance remark or offhand gesture, love flashed in a sudden revelation.

But the old formulas grew stale; the novel was an artifice into which life in its complexity could not be boxed in. In the last analysis, life was unknowable, uncertain, vague, tremendous. People were formless and shapeless, bottomless immensities. They did not change from one scene to another but from second to second. Thus the novel itself would have to change; it, too, would have to become vaguer and less neatly formed, or formed around something different, like mythology or consciousness or memory, and the best novels of the 20th century—those of Joyce, Woolf, Proust—understood that a revolution was necessary. But these novels, less straightforward, less plot-centric, less tending towards neat resolution, whatever their literary merits, complex symbolism, or poetic beauty, alienated readers of the earlier kind and widened the chasm between novels that were “fun” to read, on the one hand, and novels that were deemed “deep,” “important,” “literary,” on the other. Then, too, there was a crescendo of onslaught from other sources of stories,  other windows into the lives of our fellow human beings, other media that made bids for our attention: cinema, radio, television, the Internet, smartphones, social media.

Today the poor novel, it seems, languishes; its obituary is printed nearly daily. But Rooney, by aiming to reunite the two strands of novel-as-entertainment and novel-as-art, whether or not we think she achieves this aim, has revived its pleasures of old, generating for herself rewards both critical and commercial. A Sally Rooney book release is an event. T-shirts, tote bags, and stickers are sold. And everyone seems to have an opinion.

Rooney sketches out a brief history of the novel’s developments in her lecture on James Joyce’s Ulysses, beginning with its salacious stories of sex and seduction by the women Rooney’s fellow Trinity College alumnus, James Sterling, called “the fair triumvirate of wit,” Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood. Male novelists—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding—took up this female form, largely vanishing its maternal origins, until it was rebirthed and reared in the early 19th century by Jane Austen, who defined the novel so thoroughly and masterfully that every novelist since has lived in her shadow, as Homer did with the epic or Shakespeare the play. Ulysses, overwhelmingly allusive, drawing on so many literary predecessors, aping so many of their styles, like its protagonist Stephen Dedalus, makes explicit its relationship to its paternal forebears, while being haunted into anxiety by its ghostly mothers. For all its difficulties and polytropisms, it is, at the end of the day (literally—Ulysses takes place over the course of a single day, beginning at 8 in the morning, shortly after which Leopold Bloom takes leave of his wife Molly, and ending with his getting back into bed with her, a couple of hours after midnight) quite a simple story about love and marriage and family, i.e.,  relationships.

Rooney’s novels are also about relationships, quite explicitly so. The first Rooney I read was 2018’s Normal People, which centers on the relationship between two young people, Marianne and Connell. They come together, come apart, come together, weaving between themselves a tangled but ultimately thick cord of communion. Its ending might be taken as its thesis: “People can really change one another.” I felt moved by this ending but overall unpersuaded to join Rooney’s fan club. Yes, I had stayed up all night to read it, but the impulse was the same that had driven me to stay up countless nights as a teenager reading fanfiction: the sexual tension of Will they get together?? and the almost sexual release of that question’s answer—a pleasure peculiarly the realm of female novelists, from Austen to the Brontës to more recent publishing phenomena like Stephanie Meyer and E. L. James. “Works of art don’t succeed or fail on their technical or logical merits: they succeed or fail according to how they work on their audience,” says Rooney in her lecture.

But I was ambivalent about Normal People’s “technical or logical merits” and therefore ambivalent about whether or not it had succeeded. Rooney’s characters grated on me, posturing about race and class and gender and wealth in a way that failed to illuminate anything really revelatory or insightful about these topics—or, more importantly (since, after all, it may be unfair to look to fiction for solutions to major world problems), the characters themselves. Where Austen only needs a sentence or a snatch of conversation to shape solid flesh out of flat black type and breathe the air of life into Fanny Price and Mr. Collins, Willoughby and Captain Wentworth, Rooney lavishes paragraph after paragraph, scenes that give you nothing and go nowhere. Rooney takes the amatory structure of the 19th century marriage plot and tacks on the 20th century tendency to resist closure, and the reader cannot help but feeling like a lover teased, seduced, flirted, and foreplayed with, only to be denied orgasm.¹

And the prose itself: “He gave a kind of shrug.” (what is a “kind of shrug”?); “It’s true she is Connell’s type, maybe even the originary model of the type” (Wouldn’t “the originator of the type” or “the model of the type” or even “the original model of the type” be less clumsy?); “She steps back, clutching her collarbone…” (How does one clutch one’s collarbone?). I know this sounds nitpicky, but why do we need tedious description after tedious description of people picking things up and putting them down and going in and out of rooms?² A simple, unadorned prose style can be as effective and beautiful as a lyrical, formally inventive one, but Rooney’s use of language was not new, not beautiful, and not even economical. Though Austen paints miniatures and Joyce vast canvases, both novelists maintain careful control over their respective universes—not a word is present but that it does not have a place in the larger cosmos of things. Rooney did not give me this impression. To better understand the hype, I picked up its predecessor, 2017’s Conversations with Friends, and its successor, 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, and, coming face-to-face with similar faults, reached much the same conclusions.

Marianne and Connell in the Normal People TV series

But novel-writing is a skill, and skills are something one can improve at. Rooney’s next book came out, the hype struck again, the kind of hype that makes you question your sanity and your grip on reality when your own opinion diverges from it, and again curiosity killed the cat and my Rooney hesitations and made me pick up a copy of her latest, Intermezzo. Intermezzo centers around two brothers, Ivan and Peter Koubek, whose father has just died. Their parents—Irish mother and Slovak father (the latter to give our heroes just the tiniest smidge of foreignness)—had been separated; the brothers, too, Ivan a chess prodigy with braces and Peter a successful barrister who is culturally well-versed and popular with women, do not have the warmest of relationships. Age gaps, a particular Rooney proclivity, abound: Ivan and Peter are 22 and 32 respectively; Ivan falls for Margaret, who is 36, while Peter, who still has… something with his same-age ex-girlfriend Sylvia, is involved with a… sugar baby? Naomi, who is about Ivan’s age, 23.

In a time and society in which everything is permissible, a matter merely of the individual free will and the “consent” issued thereof, and the old prejudices at least seem to have loosened their grasp, age gap relationships are one of the last remaining relationship types one can safely raise an eyebrow at, bringing into its nexus the questions of power and exploitation, inequality and imbalance that so deliciously heighten romantic tension and set in motion the engine of romantic plot. They belong together—But barriers interpose—Parents, friends, society, circumstances, misfortunes, their own personalities conspire to tear the lovers apart—How will they overcome? What will they do? Will true love prevail?

For the older characters, Peter and Margaret, their relationships with younger partners throw into sharper relief the paths already taken, the mistakes already made, the decisions already done, the miles of life’s journey already in the rearview mirror. Back when Peter was together with his ex Sylvia, life made sense, was beautiful, perfect, whole. Under Sylvia’s influence, Peter’s relationship with Ivan became warmer, and a greater understanding sprung up between the two brothers. Bathed with the lush golden light of Sylvia’s presence, harmony and happiness abided. But at the age of 25, Sylvia got into a terrible accident, leaving her with at times crippling chronic pain and the inability to have intercourse. She ended things with Peter, yet they could not quite bring themselves to quit each other’s lives, and so they remained friends, Peter drifting from shallow dalliance to shallow dalliance, harboring a secret hope that they’d get back together somehow and take up once more the thread of what they’d had before.

Margaret, meanwhile, is separated from her husband, who is an alcoholic. Working at an arts center, she lives in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and so her relationship with Ivan is fraught not just with anxiety about what everyone will say with respect to their age gap but also fear of upsetting her husband, of other people thinking she’s upsetting her husband. When Ivan comes into her life, he offers—as love always does—a chance to start over, to begin again, to wipe the slate clean.

So, too, might Naomi for Peter, were both to allow a relationship between themselves less transactional in nature. But Naomi is a student and a sex worker and a squatter; life for her is a precarious affair, and she depends on Peter—not just his money, but his stability, his sense of responsibility, his need for her—to be her firm rock among its choppy waves. In return, Peter gets her “irrepressible love of life… the way her body luxuriates in tactility. Pleasure of her own gorgeousness in the mirror. Deep complete joy she finds in being alive.” Free, wild, insatiable, “begging to be fucked,” she is the whore to Sylvia’s Madonna, the body to Sylvia’s mind.

Though nearly the same age as Naomi, Ivan is pretty much her opposite—repressed, awkward, nerdy, a former incel (according to his brother), ill at ease in social situations. A chess prodigy whose career has stalled in recent years, he is young enough to recommit himself to the game—young and naive enough to believe that, whatever the circumstances or judgments of others, a relationship with Margaret is feasible.

As always with Rooney, the eternal hetero-optimist, romantic love has redemptive and transformative power. Ivan used to be the kind of guy who would fail to understand why one ought to give up one’s seat on public transportation to a pregnant woman. Now Margaret has inspired a kind of chivalry, “a new understanding of the relations between women and men,” and he gives up his seat gladly. To be needed by Margaret, to be her shoulder to cry on, to realize with her “this ultimate reality, that they are two people, a man and a woman, and the woman wants to lie in the arms of the man when she’s upset,” to tell her, “Margaret, it’s okay. Don’t worry. It’s alright,” to have the imperative “to protect her at all costs,” fulfills something deep and important within him, drives him towards something higher than himself, gives him purpose, empathy, understanding, a full-fledgedness of character.

Love of a woman—two women—softens Peter too, ennobles him. Sylvia, a literature professor, gives him “the presence of her intellect,” the “beauty of her mind,” is “[a]ll the good in him… His morality. Principle of his life.” He has a vision of a life with her in which he is “[h]er consort and protector.” Likewise, when Naomi tells him she feels “so safe” with him, he wants to “give her that feeling, yes.” Like Ivan with Margaret, he tells her, “Naomi, you are safe…. Completely, I promise. Everything’s going to be okay.”

For their part, the women—at least Margaret and Naomi—gladly give themselves up, open, vulnerable, receiving, trusting. Their openness reveals itself most of all during sex scenes, a realm in which Rooney retains her mastery, deftly steering between the Scylla of mawkish pornographic excess and the Charybdis of unintentional literary hilarity, coupling physical intimacy with its emotional twin to reveal characters’ desires, needs, fears, and insecurities. “Just use me, just do whatever you want. You can hurt me, it doesn’t matter,” Naomi tells Peter. “Oh, I need that,” says Margaret when Ivan tells her he loves her, and there is “[i]nside her an opening unfurling sensation.”

In contrast, Sylvia’s inability to open up physically precludes her emotional opening-up. But this is not because she can’t receive or give any sexual pleasure (as it later transpires), not because Peter doesn’t want to be with her without the penetrative sex she can’t give, but because of her own belief that she can’t make him happy without it, because the impossibility of recovering what once was wounds her pride. Yet in her post-accident frailty, she needs a man’s strength and support more than she ever did, and her silent struggle is to admit she does need Peter, just as much as he needs her.

Rooney is often criticized for being a Marxist in name only, never offering a strong enough critique of capitalism or a way for her characters out of its strictures. I think this is mistaken; at bottom, the struggle between Marxism and capitalism is that of the collective vs. the individual, and Rooney clearly comes down on the side of togetherness, connection, community, mutual affective exchange. Love—what other people do for us out of the free tenderness of their hearts, and what we do for them—is necessary to our survival in this world. It can take the form of money, shelter, food, physical pleasure, jokes, fun, laughter, shared warmth in a crowded room, quiet nature walks, encouragement, inspiration, and, yes, conflict.

However, it turns out the novel’s true closure does not lie with its romantic relationships at all, and that may be its peculiar strength. Ivan and Margaret do get closer, do learn to live their truth unashamedly, but the basic questions (how will they chart a future together in spite of the age gap and Margaret’s alcoholic ex-husband?) do not receive definitive answers. For Peter, Sylvia, and Naomi, the resolution is even more unsatisfactory, the two women fusing mind and body, spirit and sex, maturity and youth in an unconventional arrangement that we see tentatively agreed to but not actually lived out.

Portrait of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra (c. 1810); Jacques-Émile Blanche, Portrait of James Joyce (1934). Via Wikimedia Commons.

“We might propose the novel as a kind of book in which the most important subject cannot be spoken about,” says Rooney in her Ulysses lecture. In Ulysses and in the novels of Jane Austen, characters circle around deeper feelings and desires that remain submerged in some substrate of the soul that lies hidden to the characters themselves until the moment they flash out, epiphanic, like lightning from a cloud. In Intermezzo, the real barriers that interpose are those between the two brothers, and the love that prevails is ultimately fraternal.

For the whole novel, the brothers circle, separately, around the loss of their father, like a blot on the page one tries studiously to write around. Death rearranges the pieces on the board, but it also makes one see the stakes of the game clearly. What does it mean to live, after all? What becomes of us once we are no longer “too too solid flesh”? What is the point of all this living, anyhow? Rooney extends her earlier thesis that “[p]eople can really change one another” to show us that the ways in which we change one another enable us to “[g]o on in any case living,” an affirmation of life perhaps less triumphant than Ulysses’  “yes I said yes I will Yes” but no less optimistic. In the space left behind by death, we close the gap by drawing closer together.

Like Joyce, Rooney uses stream-of-consciousness to get inside the minds of her characters, namely Peter, Ivan, and Margaret. Peter’s voice is more fragmented, depressed, well-read, attuned to the physical world; sometimes the fragmentation is not always effective and comes across as clumsy. Ivan’s awkward earnestness and Margaret’s attention to quiet beauty are a little easier to bear. Because we don’t get Sylvia or Naomi, they inevitably come across as less fully fleshed-out, dependent on what Peter sees of and in them. As in Ulysses, allusions to literature, philosophy, music, etc., abound, but these are not knit into a deeper structure, do not create the kaleidoscope of associations that makes Ulysses so incredibly rich. Sometimes Rooney seems too prone to getting a point across, telling us what to think, in a way that seems facile and self-echoing—for example, “without other people, there would be no life at all.” 

Yet, all in all, there are virtues; Rooney the novelist has matured and is attempting, after all, something more ambitious. Her strengths—intimacy between characters, an ease with rendering the way we use technology today, relatable depictions of the inner lives of young people—reach toward a larger whole. Normally her lack of quotation marks appears to me unnecessary and irritatingly pretentious, but here it allows dialogue to flow easily with the streams of thoughts and observations. In an interview, Rooney mentions a practice of memorizing a poem a day, and it seems to have had a beneficial influence on her prose, resulting in moments of genuine beauty. Margaret asks Ivan what he’s passionate about, and the word “passionate” sticks in his mind—“A word with blood running through it, a red word.” Taking a walk together, Margaret and Ivan bear witness to “[g]olden-green fields stretching out into the faint blue distance. Limitless clear air and light everywhere around them, filled with the sweet liquid singing of birds.”

On the one hand, if the novel is to recover anything of the popularity it once enjoyed, if it is to be relevant to us at all, if it is to compete successfully for our attention in an age where so much else clamors for it, it must be fun, readable, pleasurable; at its most basic level, it must draw us in and seduce us to turn the pages.³ On the other, it cannot pretend that the past century’s radical innovations in style, form, and subjectivity never occurred. These poles seem opposed—the more formally experimental a novel is, the less of a page-turner it becomes. But must one really sacrifice one for the other? Can Austen and Joyce mix and together mother and father forth the novel of the 21st century? Perhaps, with Rooney as midwife. The offspring is no prodigy, and yet—who knows?—it may one day grow up into something very fine indeed.

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Happy Sunday, everyone! I haven’t been reading much contemporary fiction lately, but I was inspired to read Intermezzo by Substackers whose literary opinions I admire—

Celine Nguyen

,

Henry Oliver

,

BDM

—and finally got around to finishing it after procrastinating for ages 😂. If you’d like to read more on Rooney, I highly recommend Reading Sally Rooney in the journal Post45. I also really loved her Ulysses lecture. If you’ve read Intermezzo or any other Rooney, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

1. Maybe it’s because I’m a romantic and just wanted Marianne and Connell to finally get together after all that back and forth.

2. For this reason, I liked the TV series much better.

3. Literally, since sales of romance novels have surged in recent years, even as overall book sales are declining.