Ivan and Peter Koubek’s father has just died, but neither seems willing to talk much about it, let alone to one another.After all, it’s not like the two brothers are even friends.Peter, the eldest by a decade, pities his awkward, 22-year-old brother, a competitive chess player whose prowess for the game hasn’t done much to build his social skills or self-esteem.
But after meeting Margaret, an older woman who’s emerging from the shadow of her own crisis, Ivan’s life has begun to blossom — and the same cannot be said for Peter.A human-rights lawyer — once optimistic, now jaded — Peter’s self-medicating and can’t stop sabotaging his relationships with Naomi, a wry, carefree college student, and Slyvia, his former flame and longtime love.The days after tragedy are often hard to navigate and “Intermezzo,” the fourth novel from Irish author Sally Rooney, is a portrait of grief not fully internalized.
In her astutely intimate style, Rooney wades through the convoluted emotions that follow tragedy: certainly heartache, but also relief and longing, guilt and joy, all on the cusp of transformation.In sketching the contours of her characters, Rooney alternates between the perspectives as she did in her last novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You.” Her dialogue, characteristically bare and without quotation marks, lends a distinct musicality to her prose.As Peter’s mind becomes untethered by pills, Rooney’s close third-person voice dances over the line of spoken and unspoken, slurring together in long, drawn-out paragraphs as he wanders the streets of Dublin — meandering sentences broken by sharp staccatos of self-pity.Ivan meanwhile, follows the well-trod path of other stunted men, intelligently methodical yet rambling, grasping at emotions with insufficient words.These instances of almost are where Rooney shines.
She teases out near-ruptured emotions never fully felt by the conscience, untethering them from reality for our voyeuristic plea...