Moody men take the spotlight in Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, leaving the women as martyrs in the process, writes Anna Moloney for City A.M. Magazine
Despite having never read a Sally Rooney novel before this summer, I already felt I had a grasp on what one was: clever, literary, Dublin-centric but, perhaps above all, sad. Normal People had wrenched apart the hearts of my peers (one friend found herself unable to stop speaking in soft, breathy tones after watching the TV adaptation). Rooney was leading the Irish literary revival: dark, moody and cursed by generational trauma.
But when this was put to Rooney, she was perplexed: “I don’t think my books are that sad, are they?” she replied when one journalist mentioned the ‘sad girl September’ her fans were anticipating ahead of the release of her new novel Intermezzo. “I find my books quite optimistic,” she added, optimistically.
Author intention and reader reception are not always fated to align, but the problem here seems larger than mere miscommunication.
The rise of the so-called ‘sad girl’ has been in motion for some time: the heroin chic of the 1990s, the Tumblr gloom of the early 2010s, and now the sad girl summers and autumns of the 2020s. Musically it has been particularly pronounced (think Billie Eilish, Boygenius, the revival of Lana Del Ray, Taylor Swift’s turn from glittery pop to the aptly-titled Tortured Poets Department) but the literary scene (Blue Sisters, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the elevation of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz as ‘literary it girls’) has done much heavy lifting, too. As a glamorisation of female sadness, it is naturally problematic, but Rooney’s part in the phenomena – in no small part the result of a culture that wishes to neatly package the female experience – is unfortunate rather than complicit.
Still, Rooney now comes with a framework that is larger than her: we are aware of her legacy, we are aware we might want to say clever things about her work to our peers, we are aware that, especially if we are 20-something, fringe-wearing, tote-toting young women, we may either become stereotypes or, worse, ‘pick-mes’. (For the uninitiated, a pick-me is someone who tries to prove they’re not like the rest, or, more specifically, “not like other girls”.) ‘Like’ or ‘dislike’ no longer seem innocent terms, but weighted judgements.
With all this in mind, I approached Intermezzo with some trepidation.
Unlike Rooney’s previous novels, Intermezzo focuses on two male characters: Peter, a hotshot Dublin lawyer in his early thirties, and Ivan, his younger, dorkier, competitive chess-playing brother, who have just lost their father. The novel tracks their immediate reckoning with grief, their tempestuous relationship with each other, and, of course, their respective travails in love, flipping between their perspectives throughout. Despite the book’s marketing, which has focused on the dynamic of the brothers, it was these romances that felt like the book’s main focus. Ivan and Peter themselves only share three scenes – a shame, as this was probably the novel’s most compelling relationship.
These were the scenes that made me most sympathetic towards Peter – a necessary contrast to his supposedly gruelling love life, which involves him being fawned over by two women: one, his university sweetheart Sylvia, now a Trinity literary professor, who offers the warmth and emotional experience of an old lover; the other, the young, wild, carefree, sometime sex worker Naomi, who offers everything Sylvia does not. If this sounds like a crude binary, well, it is. “Sylvia in a silk blouse buttoned at the wrists and Naomi in a yellowish quarter-zip fleece,” Peter describes. “The one voice rich low golden and the other with the clear high purity of a bell.” Experience vs youth; comfort vs excitement; discipline vs hedonism. Yet both are beautiful. Both are intelligent. And both love Peter. These are the choices Sylvia and Naomi represent.
Frustratingly, despite each knowing Peter is in love with the other (being all-knowing is one of Sylvia and Naomi’s shared characteristics), neither fosters any real resentment about it.
That two intelligent women would fawn over one dysfunctional man is in itself not unbelievable, but that neither Naomi or Sylvia succumb to jealousy makes them painfully, painfully good (not to mention awfully, awfully convenient for our hero Peter). This may feel like a win after decades of stories that have pitted women against one another, but we shouldn’t have to make martyrs of women to make them feminist. The result is that Sylvia and Naomi feel more like tropes than people, which, even if the tropes are flattering, is hardly the nuanced depiction of real people Rooney is supposed to excel at.
But perhaps I have fallen into the tropey traps of Rooneyism itself. Do her characters need to be realistic to be successful? Do I have to relate to them? Do I need to like them? Of course not. And Intermezzo is, in many ways, a success: it’s compelling, it feels unique, it forced me to reconsider my own preconceptions about love and relationships. And perhaps one way to explore the limitations of tropes is to immerse oneself in them. So here’s to sad girl September, even if you don’t like Sally Rooney.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney is published by Faber on 23 September