Intermezzo by Sally Rooney: our honest verdict on her fourth novel. Does the chess world and the sibling story deliver? Everything you need to know.
• You loved Normal People or Conversations with Friends
• You're interested in grief, desire, and the way siblings can be utterly different people from the same family
• You appreciate literary prose that trusts the reader
• You can commit to a novel that rewards patience
• You found Rooney's earlier work too slow or interior
• You need conventional dialogue formatting to stay oriented
• You want plot over interiority
• You're looking for a quick, accessible read
Intermezzo is Sally Rooney's fourth novel, set in Dublin and following two brothers — Peter, a lawyer in his thirties, and Ivan, a chess prodigy in his early twenties — in the months after their father's death. Both brothers are in unconventional relationships. The novel asks, with great precision, what grief does to desire, and what desire reveals about the people we thought we were.
The chess material is not really about chess. Rooney uses Ivan's chess world as a lens for examining how he relates to other people — rule-based, systematic, emotionally puzzling to almost everyone around him.
Intermezzo is slower than Normal People and more demanding than Conversations with Friends. Rooney is no longer interested in the electric simplicity of her early novels — she's writing something more complicated and, in places, more rewarding.
Readers who came to Rooney expecting Marianne and Connell may feel disoriented. Readers who have followed her from the beginning will recognise a writer in full command of her material.
Intermezzo is Rooney's most ambitious novel and her best-written. It is not her most immediately pleasurable. Whether that matters depends entirely on what you want from literary fiction.
Score: 8.4/10. Essential for Rooney readers. A strong starting point if you're new to her — though Normal People is probably still the better entry point.