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How to Be Whole: A Review of Sally Rooney’s ‘Intermezzo’
Rooney’s characters in ‘Intermezzo’ reach out to each other and push back each other as they struggle to overcome grief and loss. (Some spoilers included.)
I read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo in October, and I enjoyed it, just like I did her other books. I liked all of them but I appreciated this one as stronger, showing the marks of a more experienced and older writer, writing about the topic she handles best: millennial and Gen Z relationships.
At the same time, despite feeling compelled to read Intermezzo from start to finish without interspersing other books, as is my habit, I completed it with this nagging notion that the book was not memorable.
I was wrong. Five weeks later, I’m still thinking about it.
And I’m thinking about it because the portrayals of brothers Peter and Ivan and their lovers are powerful in the way tragic characters are in an ancient Greek drama.
They are all moving in life, both pepping themselves up and expecting bad things to happen at any moment. And they muse things a lot, the way the chorus does in Greek tragedies.
