Intermezzo

Intermezzo is Sally Rooney's 2024 fourth novel, the structural project that takes her further from the close-first-person Frances-and-Connell territory of Conversations with Friends and Normal People than any of her work to date. The structural premise is the recently bereaved Koubek brothers — Peter, a thirty-two-year-old Dublin labor-and-employment lawyer who has spent the past several years between a current girlfriend (Naomi, twenty-three, a literature undergraduate) and a former girlfriend (Sylvia, his contemporary, a college professor who survived a near-fatal accident years earlier that ended their relationship), and Ivan, a twenty-two-year-old chess prodigy whose rating has fallen since his early-twenties peak. Their father has just died. The novel runs the next several months across Peter's life in Dublin, Ivan's competitive-chess weekend in Kildare and the relationship he begins with a thirty-six-year-old arts-administrator named Margaret, and the two brothers' separately attempted relationships with their grief.

Rooney's structural method is the alternation between Peter's interior third-person consciousness (rendered in Rooney's most modernist prose to date — fragmented, stream-of-consciousness, occasionally Joycean) and Ivan's more conventionally close-third-person chapters. The structural prose register is the work's actual innovation; the Peter chapters in particular represent the largest stylistic jump in Rooney's catalog and the part of the novel that has produced the strongest divided critical reception. The chess procedural texture (the rating mechanics, the tournament-and-club dynamics, the specific psychology of a young chess prodigy whose strongest years may already be behind him) is rendered with the kind of patient research-backed specificity Rooney's career has been built on. The Margaret-and-Ivan age-gap relationship in the middle third is one of the strongest contemporary American or Irish literary fiction treatments of an age-gap romance in recent memory.

Recommended as required contemporary Irish literary fiction reading, as the structural pivot in the Rooney catalog, and for the broader Rooney readership. Read alongside Beautiful World Where Are You (2021) for the structural progression Rooney has been working through. The Aidan Kelly / Mella Carron audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.