Intermezzo (4*)

 

Who knew that heteronormative conventions could be just as stifling for straight people as gays?

Sally Rooney uses a pair of Irish brothers, each gifted in his own way and both grieving the recent loss of their divorced father, to examine how other people's expectations--as well as their own--impedes their mastery of Cupid's unexpected moves? 

 

Ivan, a competitive chess player still young enough to wear highly symbolic braces, meets Margaret, an older arts administrator separated from her husband in a small Irish town where everyone knows her business.  Each brings out in the other a passion neither ever has known before, yet Margaret insists they keep their affair a secret. Eventually, Ivan, as emotionally reticent as he is physically expressive, confesses that he hates his brother, whom he accuses of stealing the opportunity to eulogize his father.  He recognizes this "theft" only in retrospect due to his immaturity which also leads to Ivan ghosting him for much of the book.

Peter, a successful human rights lawyer in Dublin is more than a decade older than his geeky brother.  He continues to carry a torch for Sylvie, a college girlfriend, now a professor, who ended their relationship after suffering a terrible bodily injury that makes sex painful and likely prohibits pregnancy, although that disability is never explicitly stated. Locked in a downward spiral with alcohol and other drugs, Peter at the same time remains highly conflicted about what he considers his transactional sexual relationship with Naomi, a stunning webcam model with a pierced septum about Ivan's age.  

The primary characters in Intermezzo are differentiated with language that evokes their various states of mind over several autumn weeks:  Ivan (aggrieved), Peter (impaired) and Margaret (frightened) as they try to come to grips with their feelings about each other.  Their intellectual soul searching occasionally becomes slightly tedious,  especially in comparison with Alexei, Ivan's adorable whippet, whose simple affections provide some welcome relief from all the angst and whose shared homelessness with Naomi finally kicks the plot into high gear. 

Without ever deviating from the quirky personalities that Rooney has taken such pains to establish, Ivan, Margaret, Peter, Sylvia and Naomi come together quite believably and even more movingly.  And, as the title suggests, this mistress of the millennial zeitgeist may not be quite done with them yet.  I can't be the only tear-drenched fan who wants to know:  where will the five of them spend Christmas?  Or even more intriguingly, who will end up with who?

Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction – which even makes sense from the evolutionary perspective – is simply the strongest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.