‘Intermezzo’: Sally Rooney has done it again with this novel of cracks in primordial relationships

“Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting. There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible.”

Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, is cleverly named. It’s no accident that she chose a word that means “a short connecting instrumental movement in an opera or other musical work” as the title. Written from the perspectives of two brothers, Peter and Ivan, the reader is free to make what they will of their stories from what is left unsaid, or the brothers only half reveal or choose to lie about. How the reader fills these silences is what “connects” the brothers to each other, thus completing their stories.

Peter and Ivan have recently lost their fathers to a long battle with cancer. Their mother left the family many years ago and is married to another man. She much prefers her stepchildren – traditionally successful – to her own. She floats in and out of the brothers’ life and each of them likes to keep the other at arm’s length at all times....

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