The title of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, refers to a move in chess, more commonly known as a Zwischenzug, in which a player delays a favourable move, such as the capture of a piece, in order to obtain an extra advantage in position. Scattered throughout are quotations from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The first is to be found in the epigraph: ‘But don’t you feel grief now? (“But aren’t you now playing chess?”)’ In context, Wittgenstein is analysing the grammar of expressing sensations of pain and painful emotions, and their respective relation to temporal duration. The later Wittgenstein conceived of language as a network of games: a series of rule-governed activities, or moves, which acquire meaning through their use in the social situations he called ‘forms of life’. The language-games he considered were relatively simple – the game of naming objects, the game of counting, the game of requesting information, the game of expressing inner states, and so on – but chess – whose two sets of pieces are coded hierarchically according to function and value, move in delimited ways through delimited terrain, and are animated by conflict – provides a handy model for a certain way of conceiving of social relations. That is no doubt why chess has also proven to be an attractive metaphor for those who specialize in that more complex language-game of representing forms of life known as the novel.

The two kings on the board of Intermezzo are thirty-two-and-a-half-year-old Peter Koubek, a former college debate champion and philosophy grad student who works as a human rights lawyer, and his twenty-two-year-old brother, Ivan, a ‘chess genius’ and freelance data analyst. Rooney sets up the brothers as mirror images. Peter is handsome, charming, professionally successful. Ivan, by contrast, wears braces and is debilitatingly awkward; he cannot get his employer to pay him on time and has seen his ranking decline, putting his ambition to achieve International Master status in jeopardy. They are also coping with the death of their father, a Slovakian immigrant, from a long struggle with cancer, in an inversely parallel way. Peter is dating Naomi, a twenty-two-year-old recent graduate from college who sells nudes online to pay her share of the rent, while Ivan has fallen in love with Margaret, the thirty-six-year-old director of a small-town art centre who has recently divorced her abusive, alcoholic husband, Ricky. Flanking these female characters are two others. Peter’s college sweetheart and current best friend, Sylvia, is a professor of English literature; although Ivan considers her part of the family, she has ended her relationship with Peter after injuries sustained in a car accident left her with a chronic pain condition that makes it difficult for her to have sex, like a twenty-first century Jake Barnes. Christine, their mother, favours Peter the Great over Ivan the Terrible, and the new family she made following her divorce from their father over both. The brothers take great pains to keep their ‘taboo’ relationships from each other; the resulting misunderstandings move the plot forward, until it climaxes in two predictable spasms of melodrama.

Like chess, literary romance is a combinatoric system, and was so long before Fitzwilliam Darcy and his £10,000 per annum showed up at the Netherfield ball. (In this respect, among others, the genre also shares, to use Wittgenstein’s term, a certain ‘family resemblance’ to pornography.) Typically, literary romance is based on conflicts between structure (the norms of class, race, sexuality, physical appearance, number, age, and so on) that govern relationship-formation in a given society and agency (the sense, common to all lovers, that the exceptional circumstances of their special attraction are uninfluenced by and ought not be beholden to these norms). If, in this game, structure, using the various psychological, social and economic sanctions at its disposal, wins, the romance is a tragedy. If, however, the lovers steadfastly resist and overcome the pressures of these sanctions, agency wins, and it is a comedy. The task of the literary romance novelist, of whom Rooney is perhaps the most prominent of her generation, is to introduce a new variant of this familiar contradiction and then to displace or resolve it in an unexpected way.

Readers of Rooney’s three romantic comedies – Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018) and Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021) – will recognize a number of narrative elements repurposed and recombined in Intermezzo. There are absent patriarchs whose authority or position has been usurped or filled by a neglectful, partial or cruel mother, and a sociopathic sibling or stepsibling. Divisions in cultural capital are spatialized in the opposition between the small-town life in the northwestern counties of Ireland and that of the more cosmopolitan Dublin, which opens out onto New York, London and the European Union. Hovering in the background of the characters’ courtships are the socio-economic spectres of alcoholism and drug abuse, as well as the threats of eviction and unemployment in rental and labour markets that have been deregulated in the respective interests of parasitic landlords and exploitative multinational employers. There is a pairing between two characters who both ‘like to win’ or ‘be right’, one of whom is a genius, and the other of whom is merely extremely intelligent, which provides for conflict of the narcissism-of-small-differences variety. There is one character who is engaged in creative or intellectual work of some kind, and one who is engaged at a professional or amateur level in politics. Yet no matter how successful they are, these activities do not provide them with a sense of satisfaction or prevent them from feeling that their lives are meaningless – especially when compared to the experience of love, which, according to the reasoning of the character who most frequently takes on the role of authorial surrogate in Intermezzo, is ‘simply the strongest reason to do anything’. As a rule, the strongest of these romantic attachments are the ones formed in youth.

And there is sex; lots of it. Around half-a-dozen of the novel’s sex scenes follow roughly the same pattern: consent is affirmatively requested and granted, the female character assures the male character that she ‘likes’ each of the particular things he is doing or finds them ‘nice’, and in case there is any reason to doubt her sincerity, her breath ‘catches’ in her throat. In two other sex scenes more significant to the plot, Sylvia self-loathingly repels Peter’s attempt at intimacy, and Naomi tells Peter: ‘Just use me, just do whatever you want. You can hurt me it doesn’t matter.’ Another inverse parallelism: pain as impediment and pain as impetus to pleasure. In the latter instance, Peter feels a little ashamed to be aroused, but Naomi’s desire places her in the company of Rooney’s previous female characters for whom subordination, abjection, masochism and ‘sexual humiliation’ are practices that fall somewhere in the emotional grey zone between eroticism and kenosis. In its treatment of sex and romance, Intermezzo continues Rooney’s preoccupation with the ‘normality theme’, which is as central to her fiction as the ‘international theme’ was to that of Henry James: the intense and juvenile longing of her characters to be perceived as ‘normal’ – as though they aspired to be chess pieces rather than human beings – and to judge themselves and others accordingly.

In other ways, Intermezzo represents a conscious departure for Rooney. Most obviously, in that its two protagonists are male siblings, rather than the friendship between Frances and Bobbi that anchors Conversations with Friends, the friendship between Alice and Eileen that anchors Beautiful World, Where Are You? or the heterosexual romance between Marianne and Connell at the centre of Normal People. Whereas the female characters, especially Margaret, are narrated in the affectless, generic, almost-deracinated style of her previous novels, Rooney depicts the consciousnesses of each of the male characters with a distinguishable narrative voice – needless to say, an eyebrow raising choice for an ostensibly feminist author. Rooney gives culturally-refined and emotionally-agitated Peter a Ulysses-lite stream-of-consciousness made up of short, subject-less fragments, studded with allusions to Hamlet, modernist literature and analytic philosophy, as well as turns of phrase that mark him generationally and nationally. She even goes so far as to tag this – ‘thoughts rapid with broken phrases, details of argument, streams diverging and crossing’ – as though she were worried that the technique would be unfamiliar to her readership. Ivan, by contrast, receives a style more reminiscent of the obsessives in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and The Pale King which Peter pejoratively characterizes as ‘International Chess English’: the exhaustively attentive, hyper-descriptive style of a person so unconfident of his interpretation of codes and cues that he must explicitly analyse each social interaction like a chess puzzle. In a further departure, Intermezzo is also told exclusively in the present tense. This creates the effect less of immediacy than of the sort of vertiginous stasis described in the epigraph. Rooney uses it to convey the twin temporal prisons of Peter and Ivan’s personal experience of grief as well as the characters’ collective experience of late capitalist social relations, states of being in which the past never seems to recede and the future takes forever to arrive.

Just as it initially seems as though the primary issue of conflict between structure and agency in Intermezzo will be the social and ethical propriety of ‘age gap’ relationships, it seems at first that Rooney will explore the normality theme through Ivan, who is described by the other characters as a ‘curio’, a ‘complete oddball’ and even ‘autistic’. ‘The question for Ivan’, the narrator tells us early on, is ‘how to become one of those [normal] people, how to live that kind of life’. But if it is Ivan’s curse to be a ‘frustrated observer of impenetrable systems’, it is his blessing to be able to at least recognize that, like a game, social relations form a system of rules or – to use the term for a high-level performance in a chess tournament – ‘norms’. To my recollection, Ivan is the first Rooney character to articulate a criticism of normality, which ‘means conformity with the dominant culture’. He is speaking of Peter, who ‘assign[s] an idiotically high, practically moral degree of value to the concept of normality’ – whether because of his shame at his immigrant background, because he was a vulnerable adolescent at the time of his parents’ divorce, or simply because the dominant culture rewards him socially and financially – though he could just as easily be speaking of the author of the multi-million copy bestseller, Normal People. As it transpires, the normality theme will ultimately concern ‘oddness’ of number rather than appropriateness of age, and Rooney will instead explore it through the relationships of the elder Koubek brother, whose fanatical identification with the norms of his ‘beloved monogamy’, in Sylvia’s words, threatens to force him to choose between his long-standing emotional attachment to her and his mutually-fulfilling sex life with Naomi.

Twenty pages from the end of Intermezzo, the final Wittgenstein quote appears. Mulling over his situation, Peter thinks: ‘Here saying “There is no third possibility” or “But there can’t be a third possibility!” – expresses only our inability to turn our eyes away from the picture.’ The ‘picture’ is the couple-form, the ‘inability’ is Peter’s conformity with the dominant culture, and the ‘third possibility’, proposed to him by Sylvia and Naomi – who have met and befriended each other thanks to a plot twist that would make Dickens doff his cap – is a polycule. I do not know to what degree the average Rooney reader is supposed to find this arrangement as outré as Peter does, but personally, I find it somewhat difficult to sympathize with the predicament of a man who is driven to the verge of suicide by the prospect of his current and former girlfriends banding together to satisfy his emotional and sexual needs. For me, the real drama was not to be found in Peter’s situation, but in Rooney’s. Would she break with the couple-form that, as critic Sarah Brouillette notes, has been the cornerstone of her previous romances, or would she instead allow structure to defeat agency and write, for the first time, an unhappy ending?

Rooney opts for comedy. Her choice goes to the heart of her vision of the world, which is more existential than economic, and of the function of the novel, which is, at bottom, a vehicle for theological consolation rather than for social critique or satire. Too much is made of Rooney’s Marxism, more in evidence in her public statements than in her fiction. True, Frances self-identifies as a ‘Marxist poet’ who wants ‘to destroy capitalism’, and Marianne wishes a ‘swift and brutal’ end to certain Teachta Dála in ‘the revolution’, but statements such as these are meant to be taken as fatuous or facetious. As for Connell and his mother, who ‘raised him to be a socialist’, they are members of the working class, and come by their politics honestly. Rooney already parodies this interpretation of her work in Beautiful World: ‘When I first started going around talking about Marxism, people laughed at me’, Eileen says, ‘Now it’s everybody’s thing’. Indeed, leftist sentiments are far from exotic among the social milieu of the characters in Intermezzo: educated, mostly upper-middle-class Europeans who grew up in the wake of the financial crash, and who, unlike their peers in the United States, can vote for democratic socialist and post-communist parties without it seeming like the choice of an alternative lifestyle. You hardly need a party card to observe, as Peter does, thinking of the uncomfortable continuity between himself and the men who pay naked pictures of Naomi, that the universal commodity ‘greas[es] with exploitation the wheels of human interaction’ or, as Ivan does, that ‘profit is actually a sort of inefficiency . . . if we organize everything in view of profit, we get things happening in the economy that make no sense.’

Rooney’s engagement with Christianity in her fiction is less-often remarked on, but far more prevalent. Sylvia has a ‘sincere and transcendent love of Christ’, which is sometimes also a ‘terrifyingly real and serious fear of Christ’. Margaret ‘seems to feel obscurely that the day she met Ivan, they brought into existence a new relationship’, and that, ‘in the eyes of God’, her loyalty to this new ‘way of being’ may demand sacrifices of her, including ‘her pride, her dignity, her life itself’. When she asks Ivan if he believes in God, Ivan articulates a theory of divinity as a kind of aesthetic principle:

I try to [believe], yeah . . . Some kind of order in the universe, at least. Listening to certain music, or looking at art. Even playing chess, although that might sound weird. It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all. And at other times, I think it’s just chaos, and there’s nothing. Maybe the whole idea of order just comes from some evolutionary advantage, whatever it is. We recognize patterns when there are no patterns . . . But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there’s a meaning behind everything.

Where Peter is concerned, multiple references are made to the fact that when he turns thirty-three, he will be the same age as Christ when he was crucified. Yet his Passion will prove to be a Nativity scene. Having finally accepted Sylvia and Naomi’s proposal, and Ivan and Margaret’s relationship, thus healing the rift between him and his brother, he has a concluding vision of the five of them celebrating Christmas together, along with his mother, and the spirit of his dead father. (Presumably Andrei, the dog Ivan inherits from his father, will also be invited, as a thank you for his services as a plot device, bringing the total attendees to eight.)

As a formal resolution to the conflict between structure and agency, this symbolic double wedding, which recalls the ending of Pride and Prejudice, uses an apparent deviation from one set of social norms – the age-appropriate couple – to reinforce rather than undermine another, more powerful one – namely, the family – all with the blessing of divine order. Even setting the political implications of this choice aside, it remains a sentimental fantasy, and, worse still, the literary equivalent of a tautology. Had Peter, in the throes of his nervous breakdown, returned to the ‘third possibility’ passage in the Investigations he would have read, ‘God sees – but we don’t know’. If this proves true for Peter it is because he is not a person, but a character in a work of fiction. His God is none other than Sally Rooney, and she has selected, out of indefinitely-many possible worlds, the one with an outcome that best illustrates the theory she has slipped into Ivan’s pillow talk. In a Rooney novel, order emerges from chaos, meaning emerges from meaninglessness, and beauty emerges from ugliness in the form of providential good fortune. Peter receives his polycule and Ivan receives his norm just as surely as Frances received her relationship, Connell received his MFA acceptance, and Eileen received her baby before them as acts of authorial grace. In reality, possible worlds marked by the lineaments of gratified desire are exceedingly rare and of very limited duration; as with all marriage plots, including comedies of remarriage like the one between Peter and Sylvia, Intermezzo is artificially brought to an end at the precise moment where it ought to begin. (Rooney may see how well Peter’s arrangement with Sylvia and Naomi withstands internal and external pressure, for example, or whether a wrench is thrown into Ivan and Margaret’s relationship by, say, her desire to have a baby, but we, her readers, will never know.) Paradoxically, novels that confront the intractability of suffering and the frustrations of desire are better able to provide the illusion of meaning in a meaningless world than the ones that flinch at these common experiences. The latter are less novels – books that resemble the world – than they are prayers: Lord, make the world resemble my books.

Rooney, who is that rare case of a popular novelist who is more intelligent than her books, is no doubt aware of this objection. While her novels sell millions of copies, are translated into dozens of languages, and are adapted for the small screen, she has established herself with somewhat less fanfare as a public intellectual and writer of short nonfiction. Her essay on Ulysses in The Paris Review was one of the more memorable contributions to the novel’s centenary celebrations. More recently, she has brought her formidable rhetorical talents, honed during her days as a debater, about which she has also written quite memorably, to a dismantling of the arguments in favour of ending Ireland’s eviction ban, and to a broadside against Taoiseach Leo Varadkar for talking out of both sides of his mouth about Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza during his St. Patrick’s Day photo op with Joe Biden, both in The Irish Times. These are hardly the interventions of a person who is unwilling to look human suffering in the face, and speak about it.

From her novels, one gets the impression that, despite her enormous fame, she reads her reviews, perhaps out of a simple love of argument, and keeps tabs on the voluminous online discourse each of them inspires. The flip side of the coin of the recrudescence of the reader’s interest in the relationship of the author and the work is the author’s interest in the relationship between the work and the reader, both of which are made possible by an accelerated feedback loop between text, paratext, and commentary. As we have seen in the case of the normality theme, prose style, the couple-form, and Marxism, critiques of Rooney’s novels are addressed within them. To this list we might add the passages that have appeared in each of her novels since Normal People, pointedly criticizing the commodification of art and the commercialization of beauty, through advertising, marketing or the cult of celebrity. The one in Intermezzo reads: ‘Everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising. Sense that nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically.’ An uncharitable reader might describe this as biting the hand that feeds, since few contemporary writers have been more notable beneficiaries of advertising, marketing and the cult of celebrity than she. But in sentences such as these one detects a sincere anxiety that Rooney, at age thirty-three, is still working through, about the tensions between the view that ‘God is an aesthetic principle that gives life meaning’, the view that ‘nothing can mean anything anymore aesthetically’, and the conditions of production and distribution that enabled millions of people around the world to read the novels in which they appear. If the title of Rooney’s fourth novel refers not only to the intermezzo in the chess match that Peter and Ivan ultimately play to a draw, but to the one Rooney plays with her readers and critics, it will be interesting to see her next move.

Read on: Enrica Villari, ‘Between History and Theory’, NLR 148.