Intermezzo, Sally Rooney

This might be Sally Rooney’s strongest novel yet. At least, it seems the most confident, like she knows exactly what she wants to do and is doing it, and isn’t getting sidetracked, indulging in tangents. Or maybe it’s that she’s not spending as much time on the stuff that *I* find less compelling, heh heh. But it seems to me that this book is subtler; like she recognizes that she can show rather than tell; that the political forces shaping her characters’ lives will emerge more clearly when they aren’t talking about politics all the time. And that people’s self-destructive tendencies are just as poignant, perhaps even more so, when they are expressed in hundreds of tiny ways, rather than in acts of sensationalistic brutality.

Although the Wittgenstein references didn’t seem all that integral to the book, the question of private language is quite apt for what I see as Rooney’s central romantic fantasy: the idea of love as total understanding without any need for explanation. Mind-reading and complete acceptance. The intuitive grasp of what the person you love wants and needs, both verbally and sexually. It’s a very appealing fantasy! And she plays it out so subtly and persuasively that you almost don’t notice how quasi-magical it is. It dovetails elegantly with the book’s clear interest in modernist technique — Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are all over this thing, and meld beautifully with her slightly flat style. Rooney’s prose is always absorbing, but here it’s also frequently beautiful.

The other thing, I think, that makes this book seem more complex is that it is just as interested in the relationships between sibling, and parents and children, as it is in romantic and sexual bonds. And they are given their due as important, perhaps all the more so because they aren’t chosen, and are more likely to be sustained even across profound disappointment or even dislike, and that ambivalence is interesting.

Is it one of the best books of the year? There’s too much hype around her to be able to say, for me anyways. I did not, for instance, find it all that profound as a book about grief, which is what many people seem to celebrate it for. But whatever: I very much enjoyed reading it.