Thomas's Reviews > Intermezzo

Okay, wow. This book, though imperfect, blew me away. By far my favorite Sally Rooney novel, and I’m so happy I can finally give one of her books more than three stars!

Rooney’s writing is just superb. Her dialogue and the way she so fully embodies her characters’ voices – so impressive. The way she can write about an interaction between two people and capture all the subtle nuances and tiny yet significant emotional grooves of human interaction. Her ability to write scenes like these made me feel like I was right there in the novel with the characters, or right in their heads as they introspected. There were a handful of passages where I literally gasped from how beautiful her writing was (e.g., Ivan reflecting on his late father and feeling grief, Peter missing Ivan and wanting him to know he’s been on his side even though he hasn’t shown it, Margaret contemplating her life taking a different route than she expected). There’s so much brilliance in these pages about grief, the painful ways we hurt those we care about, and illness and trauma.

I think these deeper themes help explain why I liked this book so much more than her other novels. I’ve always found her writing extremely engaging, which is why I didn’t hesitate to pick up Intermezzo from my local library. But, with her past novels, I felt annoyed because the characters were messy and uncommunicative in a repetitive way that was frustrating because the miscommunications carried the whole plot. But in this book, even though the characters were still messy and still miscommunicated, I felt a maturity in Rooney’s characterization that wasn’t there before. Even though none of the characters were perfect, they were doing their best, and the plot didn’t only rely on them miscommunicating with one another. Also, a lot of the characters grew by the end of the book, thank goodness.

Also, I *loved* Sylvia and Ivan. To be honest I still think Sylvia is way better than anything Peter deserves, but whatever she’s amazing and selfishly she reminds me of myself, two college professors doing our thing and being better than any mediocre man around us (lol). I also was so engaged with Ivan’s perspective. He was such a sympathetically earnest character, and while Rooney captured all of her characters’ voices well, I was particularly endeared by his.

The one thing I felt most annoyed by about this book was how men (specifically Peter) used women as a way to heal from their mental health issues?? Let me say, I totally get that we can ask our friends, romantic partners, family, etc. to support us when we have mental health issues, like I’m not saying we should never rely on other people. But I feel like Rooney has this odd trope in her novels where men are extremely emotionally stunted and the way they get over it is by having the extremely emotionally intelligent women in their lives teach them how to be better communicators and to actually understand themselves more – which is literally what happened in this book with Peter. None of the female characters in this book were perfect, thankfully, and Peter himself did grow and even though he got on my nerves the most I did empathize with him, but still, the idea of women being men’s therapists (and in an unreciprocated way) bugs me. Like I think about Post-Traumatic by Chantal Johnson, Sea Change by Gina Chung, and Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, all some of my favorite realistic fiction novels of the past few years, and while the main characters did have female friends in their lives who helped them, they also had to seek help in other ways, either through therapy or other means. Meanwhile Peter was just educated by Sylvia and Naomi.

Anyway, I still really enjoyed this novel and was definitely riveted by it. The Peter and Ivan conflict was masterfully done in my opinion, and her writing evoked feelings from within me related to grief, family, and even friendship. I also appreciate that Rooney doesn’t try to shoehorn characters of color into her cast – like, people of color don’t need to be thrust into books with white people, we have our own stories and we can just read those. It’s nice to read a book and not have to worry if the author is going to horribly portray people of color. As you can discern this book brought up a lot for me based on the length of this review. If the synopsis interests you, I’d recommend you read it!