NEW YORK, September 24, 2024 — Sally Rooney publishes INTERMEZZO today, and the publishing event surrounding the arrival deserves a brief acknowledgment before the book itself does. Midnight release events at bookshops in London, Dublin, and Manhattan. Preorders that pushed the novel to number one on Amazon before it had been reviewed. Bookstore displays constructed in advance. Coverage in outlets that do not usually cover literary fiction. Rooney, at thirty-three, occupies a place in the culture that almost no literary novelist under forty has occupied in the last several decades. Whether that place is deserved has been argued at exhausting length. The relevant question, with INTERMEZZO now in readers’ hands, is what she has actually done with it.

The answer is her most confident and most emotionally serious novel to date. INTERMEZZO is longer than any of her previous books. It is quieter than CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS. It is more masculine in its perspective than NORMAL PEOPLE. It is less overtly political than BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU. And it is, on the terms Rooney has been quietly building across four novels, the most complete demonstration yet of what she can do.

What the Book Is

INTERMEZZO is a novel about two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, in the weeks and months following the death of their father. Peter is a thirty-two-year-old Dublin lawyer, verbally fluent, romantically compromised, quietly self-destructing. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player, ten years younger, socially awkward, on the autism spectrum, and, at the novel’s opening, beginning a relationship with a woman fourteen years his senior. The brothers do not, in the ordinary way brothers do in novels, understand each other. They love each other. They wound each other, mostly by accident. They are grieving a father whose absence has revealed how much of their relationship was mediated through him.

Rooney tells the novel in alternating perspectives, and the two prose styles are among the most audacious formal choices she has made. Peter’s chapters are rendered in a fragmented, staccato, third-person interior style that reflects the disintegrating focus of a man in the middle of a slow-motion crisis. Ivan’s chapters are more traditionally rendered, calmer, more patient, closer to the tempo of chess itself. The two voices, running in counterpoint, produce a novel that behaves like the musical term it takes its name from. An intermezzo, in classical composition, is the interlude between the main movements. Rooney’s novel is the interlude in her characters’ lives between the father who defined them and the futures they will have to construct without him.

What Rooney Is Doing, and Why It Matters

The critical conversation around Rooney has, from the beginning, been distorted by her own success. The scale of her audience, the fashion around her books, the reflexive dismissals from writers whose sales she outperforms, the reflexive canonization from readers whose emotional connection to her work is genuine, have combined to make it strangely difficult to talk about the actual literary work she is producing. INTERMEZZO, which is a book most easily read by readers willing to slow down, may finally clear that noise.

What Rooney has been doing across four novels is quietly building a body of work about the specific conditions of contemporary Irish and Anglo-Atlantic life in the twenty-first century: the collapse of religious authority, the reconstitution of romantic and familial obligation, the moral confusion of educated young people who have inherited neither the certainties of the previous generation nor a stable set of terms for replacing them. She writes desire with unusual honesty. She writes conversation with an ear that most of her contemporaries do not have. And she has, over four books, built the skills of a genuine novelist rather than the persona of a generational spokesperson.

INTERMEZZO is the book in which the novelist becomes impossible to see around the persona. It is the book that demonstrates, at four hundred and fifty pages, that Rooney is capable of scale, of masculine interiority, of grief that does not resolve, of chess as a novelistic device, of the kind of prose that rewards a slow reader more than a fast one. It is the book that will be taught in twenty years.

Why It Matters

Every literary generation produces one or two novelists whose work becomes the axis around which a decade of fiction is measured. Rooney is one of hers. INTERMEZZO is the novel that will make it difficult to argue with that assessment, even from readers who have found her previous novels too small, too circumscribed, or too specifically tuned to the emotional bandwidth of a particular demographic. This book is bigger, quieter, more male, more grief-shaped, and more formally patient than anything she has written before.

For readers new to Rooney, INTERMEZZO is a plausible starting point precisely because it is the book that stands most clearly on its own, without the surrounding cultural apparatus that has enveloped her earlier novels. For readers who have followed her since CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, it is the book they have been quietly hoping she would write: the one in which the writer becomes larger than the phenomenon.

INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook wherever books are sold. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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