The incel and the dreamboat

As in Sally Rooney’s previous novels, the main characters in Intermezzo fall in love quickly, tidily and passionately. They meet, their outfits are described, they exchange clipped dialogue and are soon free to engage in ever so slightly masochistic (but mutually satisfying) sex, climaxing in perfectly symmetrical and somewhat juvenile confessions of affection. This is a pretty little world in which the girls wear lots of nice skirts and the boys are real softies and the worst thing that can reasonably happen is that it gets rainy in Ireland, as it tends to do at sad moments.

So it is perhaps surprising that Intermezzo is also a novel about a “creep”, “incel” chess player regarded as “fascist” by his money-grubbing, morbidly depressed brother Peter, a lawyer. Not that these traits, repeatedly emphasized in overly expositional dialogue, seem to have much bearing on the actions or even affect of either character. Our incel, Ivan, who, Peter tells his girlfriend, is “kind of autistic”, is also an exquisitely sensitive young man (hairless and still wearing braces at twenty-two) who showers many empathetic questions – and neck kisses – on his new thirty-six-year-old girlfriend, a divorcée who runs the local cultural centre. He doesn’t call her a “roastie” or “empty egg carton” even once. He seems to have spent his university years snogging girls at parties and has plenty of friends with whom to go down the pub; and he is spontaneously described as handsome by every woman he meets.

Peter, for his part, isn’t all that shabby. Despite being depicted as the sick man of Ireland, this thirty-two-year-old is highly social, highly functioning and, for all the talk of his money and how it “corrupts”, turns out to be a human rights lawyer advocating for women in the workplace (dreamboat alert!). He is, though, a sugar daddy to a bratty little sugar baby, Naomi, with whom he is “in love”. The reasons for this are clear, as Naomi’s tidy foil, Peter’s highly intellectual ex-girlfriend Sylvia, explains to him: “It’s the usual thing, you don’t like being vulnerable”. “Once you meet your soulmate, there’s no point pretending, is there?” Peter admits to himself. But Peter also still loves Sylvia.

Intermezzo is being trumpeted by the publishers as Rooney’s Great Leap Forward, and I suppose it will be seen as some sort of accomplishment that she writes about characters who are not literature students at, or graduates of, Trinity College. This has long been one of her insecurities. At the beginning of Beautiful World, Where Are You (TLS, October 1, 2021), the love interest of the Rooney stand-in character asks her: “What kind of people do you write about, people like you?” That love interest was a gruff, semi-mute warehouse worker who melts his girlfriend’s hardened heart with squirrel videos, and this depiction of the noble prole who loves a writer so smart and sensitive she has to go to the psychiatric hospital was surprisingly well received. But we had been warned: in the hugely successful Normal People (TLS, September 7, 2018), the tender-loving couple comprised the superbright Marianne and the sexy son of her family’s maid. For moves like this, Rooney has been praised as a “Marxist” novelist.

In contrast to these later books, Rooney was really quite funny in her breakout debut, Conversations with Friends (TLS, September 29, 2017), safely ensconced in the halls of Trinity. Yet there is something sanitized in her work, even childlike, when it comes to describing anything outside them. Ivan is fiercely concerned with women’s pleasure and his only less than perfectly feminist viewpoint is his agitation at having to give up his seat to pregnant women on public conveyances (he is anxious about overpopulation and worries about the climate) – but he gives up this reflex the moment he sleeps with Margaret. Naomi, meanwhile, is said to put “photos” of herself online, but Rooney never besmirches us with the slightest description of what those photos might look like. She does depict Naomi as an idiotic slob who does nothing but eat Doritos, paint her nails and gossip. An actual sentence reads: “She wants to watch a compilation of snooker shots you’ll never believe, and he wants to watch Alfred Brendel playing Mozart’s Sonata No. 14 in C Minor”. Even so, her attire is not too different from that of any other Rooney female; her neat outfits are described at great length, with much attention to fabric (cashmere, lambswool) and the tortoiseshell clasps she wears in her hair.

While Naomi moons about vacuously and sexily, Sylvia can no longer have penetrative intercourse due to her chronic pain (very on trend) stemming from an opaque “accident”, though she rarely appears to be in much pain and always looks perfectly neat and “beautiful”. Moreover, she is still game for some of the novel’s sex scenes, which occur ad nauseam (and even, in one case, post nauseam). “But just from your own perspective”, Peter asks Sylvia, “there are still certain things you find – pleasurable?”

Where Naomi engages in generic “dirty talk” and says she “likes it rough”, telling Peter to “do anything you want” (“everything in him aching to give it to her”), Sylvia, a literature academic, makes the novel respectable, even “intellectual”. On several occasions she recites, but does not analyse, the Pinocchio’s hat problem from the philosophy of language (if a man has no hats, would it be a lie for him to say all his hats were green?) – a problem that just happens to have gone viral in June 2022, presumably at a point when Rooney was writing Intermezzo. Sylvia also discusses a paper she is preparing for a Jane Austen symposium and complains that she must give a lecture on “the social origins of literary modernism”. But Rooney never seems interested in the details. Similarly, while Ivan is hailed as a chess prodigy, the only real way this appears to affect his life, outside a few competition scenes, is when he chooses to spend a night of ecstasy with Margaret instead of “studying opening theory” (no further elaboration here, despite “opening theory” being the first topic anyone studies when they join middle-school chess club). At one point he is revealed to have studied theoretical physics at university, though he has done nothing with it. Peter studied theoretical philosophy before specializing in human rights law to make his fortune, though he also, somewhat bafflingly, teaches private law remedies (ie contracts) and EU competition law, as if the same lawyer/lecturer/ whatever would bounce seamlessly from women’s rights to the intricacies of the Google antitrust case.

Intermezzo has the form but not the content of a novel of ideas. Here is the female character of sensuality; here is she of the mind. And here is the male of the mind, here he of the body (but also of the mind – which is perhaps why he gets to have his cake and eat it, dating both women to the consternation of neither). Each character has been flattened like the butter on the bread they incessantly eat, turned into a blandly satisfying fantasy of good humour, essentially good motives and good old romance. Love heals all wounds here, wounds that weren’t even really wounds. For while Intermezzo also presents as a novel about “grief”, the brothers’ father having recently died, he is sketched so vaguely that we must content ourselves with bland and unaffecting sentiments such as the information that “he was such a good person”. And finally, Intermezzo also makes a stab at being a novel of style. In 2022 Rooney wrote an essay about her admiration for Ulysses, and one imagines that the clipped, fragmentary sections in Peter’s voice, and the initially ample but quickly dissipating use of allusion, are an attempt at modernist stream-of-consciousness. Yet the language used, and the sentiments expressed, are more Yoda than Joyce:

She says if she’s going to stay they should think about ordering dinner and he says sure. Watches her on her phone looking at online menus. Dark her lips slightly parted. Mouth he has how many times kissed. Nothing for it now he’s promised. She knew of course what he had been thinking. Always knows. Maybe we both thought we could get away with it.

With its two “difficult” brothers in crisis, Intermezzo in some ways recalls Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised – but made palatable for a global audience. Even the inclusion of a sex-worker character fails to elicit the slightest actual description of what that work might involve or feel like. It would seem that mainstream publishing wishes to gain the credibility of allusion to the more sullied aspects of contemporary life without depicting anything unsavoury. I imagine the Sally Rooney team chafes at the potential of losing even one member of her huge fanbase, and thus she has strained this tactic to absurdity, writing a young adult novel about two supposedly problematic males who make love tenderly and give love fiercely. Money, work, even the internet – none of these threaten to impinge on the function of her sentimental machine.

Ann Manov is a writer and attorney based in Brooklyn. She edits The End, a small magazine of poetry, fiction and memoir

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