Sally Rooney’s fourth novel arrives with the weight of enormous expectation and the freedom of a writer who has stopped trying to replicate her earlier successes. Intermezzo follows two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, in the months after their father’s death. Peter is a successful Dublin barrister in his thirties, juggling a relationship with a younger woman named Naomi and his lingering attachment to Sylvia, a woman he once loved who now lives with chronic pain. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old chess player, socially awkward and emotionally raw, who begins a relationship with Margaret, a woman more than a decade older. Grief pushes the brothers apart while their romantic entanglements force them to confront who they are when the family structure that defined them falls away.
The book is Rooney’s longest and most structurally ambitious. She alternates between the brothers’ perspectives, using distinct prose styles for each: Peter’s sections are written in fragmented, anxious stream-of-consciousness, while Ivan’s chapters unfold in more conventional close third person. The contrast is intentional, reflecting not just different temperaments but different ways of processing loss.
Two Brothers, Two Languages of Grief
Rooney’s emotional intelligence has always been her primary strength, and here it operates at a higher level than in her previous novels. Peter and Ivan are both grieving, but they grieve differently and can’t recognize each other’s pain. Peter intellectualizes and self-medicates, burying his loss beneath professional competence and romantic chaos. Ivan feels everything at full volume and has no language for it, turning instead to chess, where emotion can be channeled into pattern and strategy. Their inability to connect with each other, even as they desperately need to, provides the novel’s most affecting material.
The prose style for Peter’s sections is a genuine departure for Rooney. The fragmented sentences, the associative leaps, the way his thoughts circle obsessively around Sylvia while his body is with Naomi, these capture a mind in crisis with uncomfortable accuracy. Rooney has always written clean, controlled prose, and watching her break that control deliberately, making the style enact Peter’s psychological state, represents a real artistic advance.
The romantic relationships are drawn with the nuance that readers expect from Rooney but with less of the power dynamics that defined her earlier work. Ivan and Margaret’s relationship is the most tender material in the book. Their age difference, which would be the source of drama in a lesser novel, is handled with surprising gentleness. Margaret’s complicated past and Ivan’s social difficulties create obstacles that feel organic rather than manufactured, and their scenes together have a warmth that the novel’s other relationships lack.
Rooney’s engagement with class and money is subtler here than in her previous books but still present. Peter’s legal career, Ivan’s marginal existence in the chess world, Margaret’s financial precarity, and Naomi’s casual relationship with money all create different textures. Rooney doesn’t make explicit arguments about economic inequality, but she shows how money shapes what kinds of relationships are possible and what kinds of vulnerability people can afford.
The father’s death, while offstage, saturates every page. Rooney handles grief not as a dramatic event but as a condition that alters the quality of everything: conversations, meals, sleep, desire. The brothers’ loss manifests differently in each relationship, and part of the novel’s power is watching how grief distorts connection, making people reach for intimacy they can’t sustain or retreat from closeness they need.
Where the Ambition Strains
At nearly 450 pages, the novel is significantly longer than Rooney’s previous books, and the length shows. The middle sections, particularly some of Peter’s more repetitive internal spirals, could have been trimmed without losing emotional or thematic content. The fragmented style that works so well in Peter’s early chapters becomes wearing over time, and some readers report skimming his sections by the novel’s second half. The technique is effective but perhaps deployed at greater length than it can sustain.
The four romantic leads, while individually well-drawn, create a crowded emotional landscape. Balancing Peter-Naomi, Peter-Sylvia, Ivan-Margaret, and Peter-Ivan means that no single relationship gets as much sustained attention as the central pairings in Normal People or Conversations with Friends. Some readers feel that the novel trades depth for breadth, giving us more characters but less time with each.
Sylvia’s characterization has drawn mixed responses. She’s the most enigmatic of the four romantic figures, and her chronic pain condition keeps her somewhat removed from the novel’s action. Some readers find her fascinating precisely because she remains slightly unknowable. Others feel that she functions more as a symbol of Peter’s past and his guilt than as a fully realized character in her own right.
The chess material, while thematically important, doesn’t always integrate smoothly. Rooney uses chess as a metaphor for Ivan’s way of thinking and for the strategic calculations that underlie even intimate relationships, but the tournament scenes can feel like they belong to a different novel. Readers who aren’t interested in chess may find these passages slow, and the metaphorical weight placed on the game occasionally feels forced.
The ending has divided readers. Without revealing specifics, the novel’s resolution is quieter and more open than some readers expect after four hundred pages of buildup. Rooney doesn’t tie her threads into a neat bow, which is consistent with her artistic sensibility but leaves some readers feeling that the emotional investment doesn’t receive a proportional payoff.
The Game Between the Games
The title points to the novel’s central idea. An intermezzo is a pause between acts, a transitional passage that connects what came before to what comes next. Peter and Ivan are both in transition, between relationships, between identities, between the family they had and whatever comes after. The novel argues that these in-between states, the periods when nothing is settled and everything is in flux, are where people are most fully themselves, stripped of the roles and routines that normally define them.
This is also what makes grief the right lens for Rooney’s exploration. A parent’s death is the ultimate intermezzo, the end of one version of yourself and the uncertain beginning of another.
Should You Read Intermezzo?
If you’ve followed Rooney’s career and want to see her take real artistic risks, this is the book to read. It’s also her most emotionally generous novel, less concerned with power dynamics and more interested in the messy, uncomfortable work of loving people you don’t fully understand. Readers who care about family relationships in fiction, who appreciate prose that adapts its style to its subject, and who are willing to sit with ambiguity will find this deeply rewarding.
Skip it if Rooney’s previous work hasn’t connected with you, if 450 pages of contemporary relationship drama sounds excessive, or if fragmented stream-of-consciousness prose tests your patience. The novel’s length and structural experiments won’t convert skeptics, and readers looking for a tightly plotted story will find the pacing frustrating. This is a book that rewards patience and doesn’t hurry toward its conclusions.
The Verdict on Intermezzo
Sally Rooney wrote her most ambitious novel and, for the most part, pulled it off. Intermezzo is longer, more structurally complex, and emotionally richer than her previous work, and it shows a writer pushing past the formula that made her famous. The length occasionally works against it, and not every thread carries equal weight. But the portrait of two brothers trying to survive their grief and find their way to each other is drawn with real skill and genuine feeling. It’s the work of a writer who has more to say and is still finding new ways to say it.