Connect Only – DRB

Aimée Walsh writes: There are few writers whose books do that rare thing of being a cultural event that extends beyond the literary world. Sally Rooney, whose work has become a (grudging) emblem for millennial angst or “sad girl lit,” is a writer who does just that. Her books bridge the gap between commercial fiction and literary fiction; it’s a sharp and narrow divide, created by professionals in the publishing industry, that separates the two genres. But Rooney’s work straddles both sides, and speaks to all who need to hear it. It’s this rejection of the banality of the commercialization of the literary arts that makes Rooney’s Intermezzo a rare jewel.

Marketing is fleeting, but art is not. Intermezzo is a distinctly existential novel, one that focuses on life, death, and how to navigate our material realities under capitalism and the Sisyphean tasks of clocking in and out and paying bills. Meanwhile, ecosystems crumble under the pressure of emissions. And people feel lonelier and more disconnected than ever, despite increased “connectivity” via the internet. Intermezzo asks us, the reader: is there another way to live? How can we live, when the world is as it is? In this new novel, Rooney, in her signature style, portrays the connections between friends and lovers as if the world depended on it, and I think it does.

At the time of writing, we are a few weeks away from publication and the marketing campaign for this fourth book feels noticeably different. The Co Mayo author rose to fame with her debut, Conversations with friendsbut it was in her second novel, Normal peoplethat she became a household name. The TV series, co-written by Alice Birch, was released around the world during the first national lockdown due to the coronavirus. It would not be an exaggeration to describe the response to the series as a kind of hysteria. With Daisy Edgar-Jones, who played Marianne, and Paul Mescal, who played Connell, they became obsessions with what felt like most of the internet. To this day, an Instagram account for ‘Connell Waldron’s Chain’ still has 132,000 followers. After that, the marketing campaign went into overdrive in the run-up to her third book, Beautiful world, where are you? Faber gave us branded hats, pop-up merchandise stores and a mural in Shoreditch, London.

But for Intermezzo There is a silence. There is – at the time of writing at least – no bucket hat in sight. It is refreshing. Rooney’s work needs no pomp or gimmickry. Intermezzo marks the beginning of her career as a writer of ideas, as a novelist for the nation. Much has been written about the novel’s ability to reflect the state of the nation. It comes in waves. Edna O’Brien’s Girls from the Countryside did this in 1960s Ireland, and Rooney’s work does this for contemporary Ireland, holding up a mirror to us all, showing us in all our brutality and tenderness. At a crucial moment of crisis in the novel, the home of one character, Naomi, and her housemates is raided by the gardaí, resulting in a night in jail. She asks, ‘How many properties do they keep empty, probably lost count, blood-sucking parasites?’ Here we find Rooney as an American novelist, reflecting (some of) the horrors of modern life onto the reader.

The main feature of Rooney’s work is the exploration of eroticism, particularly age-gap relationships and friendships between women. Intermezzo treads similar ground, with the major departure being its focus on male interpersonal relationships, specifically those between two brothers. Peter and Ivan are grieving the loss of their father. Ten years separate the two. Peter works as a human rights lawyer and Ivan is a fading chess genius. The two’s familial ties have been broken, and so have their respective romantic relationships. At a chess norm—a kind of competition to get ahead—twenty-two-year-old Ivan meets Margaret, fourteen years his senior. And for Peter, he’s caught between two women. The first, Sylvia, is his college sweetheart, who can’t be intimate with him after an accident. The other, Naomi, is a college student who also works as a sex worker to pay her bills and tuition. For some writers, managing so many crucial relationships can be too much, too difficult to execute, but Rooney charts each one as if it were the only one, as if it deserved priority. And isn’t that true of life, of all of us? The nature of feeling – of love and of sorrow – is both universal and subjective. Pain or longing is feeling like you are the first to encounter that particular emotion, and Rooney’s characters embody this paradox between the collective and the individual beautifully.

Intermezzo relates to an age of capitalism at its core: that money, to have or to want, is akin to “greasing the wheels of human interaction with exploitation.” Peter has an “irrational attachment to meaning,” where he “couldn’t go to work in the morning unless he thought something meant something else.” The two, capital and human relationships, are intertwined. But what about life, when interpersonal ties are tied to salaries and bills? Intermezzo tells us that we have a responsibility to each other and to the environment, and that this is the main gain or loss we should be concerned about.

Our bodies are sexual entities, limited in myriad ways by capitalism. Naomi, we are told, has “no job, no family support, no fixed address, no government benefits, no money to finish college. Owner of nothing in the world but her own perfect body.” The use of the term property is brilliant here, fusing possession, the body, and capital. Naomi’s body is her marketplace, she uses it and the sexual desire of others to pay her bills. It is interesting, then, that Peter’s other lover, Sylvia, cannot have sex because of a traumatic event. The rupture this creates between them is the rupture in their relationship. Think then of life under capitalism, or to reframe it as profit culture, where we are constantly driven to a goal of accumulation, of acquiring more and more of whatever we want. How do we reconcile love under these parameters? Our needs are not only met by a single entity, Intermezzo tells us. Peter says, ‘I love you. Her. Both of us… Christ universally commands us to love one another.’ Rooney takes this inherently Christian belief and applies it to a polycule scenario, a uniquely modern take on love.

This novel has much to say about the philosophical interaction between the body and the mind. Bodies are beautiful, but rebellious and ruinous. Sylvia is unable to control her pain. Peter and Ivan’s father is struck by renegade cells that have developed into cancer. As Ivan puts it, ‘the body (is) a fundamentally primitive object’ while the mind ‘is capable of supreme rationality’. Capable, yes, but that fulfillment is not guaranteed. The connection between the mind and the body is language, that which externalizes the inner. Of sex, the act of bringing two bodies together, we are told, ‘the intimacy between them felt total and perfect, their ways of knowing each other beyond language’. This, then, is the crux of Intermezzothe connection between people – not just sexual, but platonic – is a kind of magic, a gain we should all strive for. As Ivan puts it: ‘To have met her like that: beautiful, perfect. A life worth living, yes.’

22/9.2024

Aimée Walsh is a Belfast-based writer. Her debut novel, Banishedwas published in the United Kingdom and Ireland in spring 2024.