Intermezzo

Rooney Changes Register

Sally Rooney’s first three novels — Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You — established her as the defining literary voice of millennial fiction: cool, precisely observational, alert to the power dynamics embedded in relationships that present themselves as egalitarian. Her male characters were notably less fully inhabited than her female ones.

Intermezzo is a deliberate correction. The novel’s two protagonists are Peter Kowalski, a thirty-two-year-old Dublin lawyer who manages grief through controlled emotional detachment and multiple simultaneous relationships, and Ivan, his twenty-two-year-old brother, a chess professional whose social awkwardness is misread as coldness but is actually the specific vulnerability of someone who has learned the world through strategy rather than social navigation.

The novel follows them through the months after their father’s death, separately and occasionally together.

A New Prose Style

Readers who come to Intermezzo expecting Normal People’s compressed, dialogue-driven prose will find something different. Rooney has adopted a more fluid, interiority-focused style that moves through memory and present-tense experience without the sharp temporal delineation of her earlier work. The prose is warmer than her previous novels — less ironic, more willing to sit with emotion rather than observe it from distance.

This shift is both the book’s strength and its challenge. The warmth is earned; the pace is more demanding.

Two Brothers’ Different Griefs

What Rooney achieves with Peter and Ivan is showing how the same loss produces radically different grief responses from two people who share a genetic and biographical foundation. Peter’s grief is managed, analytical, expressed through the structure of his professional life and the specific emotional economy of his relationships. Ivan’s grief is closer to the surface — he is less protected by irony — and his relationship with a divorced woman fifteen years his senior (Margaret) is handled with more tenderness than Rooney has previously extended to her romantic subplots.

The brothers’ interactions carry the novel’s emotional core: two people who share everything important and struggle to talk about any of it.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Rooney’s most mature novel demonstrates her growing range — a warmer, more psychologically generous work that successfully inhabits male interiority for the first time in her fiction.

Grief in Two Registers

The structural premise of Intermezzo — two brothers metabolizing the same loss in opposite ways — gives Rooney a frame for her most sustained study of grief, and she uses it to show how completely a single event can refract through different temperaments. Peter, the older brother, manages his father’s death the way he manages everything: through control, through the analytic machinery of his professional life, through an emotional economy in which multiple relationships are kept in careful, deniable balance. His grief is real but armoured, expressed only in the cracks of a personality organized around not showing it. Ivan, younger and less defended, carries his loss closer to the surface; his social awkwardness, so easily misread as coldness, is in fact the rawness of someone who has not learned to hide what he feels.

Rooney’s insight is that shared loss does not produce shared mourning. Peter and Ivan have the same dead father, the same childhood, the same grief in principle, and yet they grieve as strangers to each other’s grief, each baffled and slightly repelled by the other’s way of coping. The novel’s quiet tragedy is that the loss which should bind them instead exposes how little they know how to talk to one another.

A Warmer Prose

The most discussed feature of Intermezzo among Rooney’s readers is its style, which represents a real departure. Gone is the compressed, dialogue-driven austerity of Normal People; in its place is a more fluid, interior prose that moves through memory and present sensation with a lyricism Rooney had previously withheld. Peter’s sections in particular are rendered in a fractured, associative mode that mimics the texture of a mind under strain. The effect is warmer and more vulnerable than her earlier work — less ironic, more willing to sit inside an emotion rather than observe it from a cool distance.

This warmth is the book’s central achievement and its principal demand. Readers who prized the diamond-hard control of her earlier novels may find the new register diffuse; the pacing is deliberate to the point of occasional inertia. But the looser style is doing deliberate work. Grief is not compressed or efficient, and a prose that sprawled and circled and doubled back was perhaps the only honest way to render it.

Inhabiting Men

For a writer whose male characters had always been the weaker half of her fiction — sketched more thinly than the women they loved — Intermezzo is a pointed correction. The novel’s two centres of consciousness are both men, and Rooney inhabits their interiority with a generosity she had not previously extended to male characters. Ivan’s tender, uncertain relationship with the older Margaret, in particular, is handled with a care that earlier Rooney might have undercut with irony. It is the work of a writer expanding her range on purpose, demonstrating that the emotional intricacy she brought to young women is not the limit of what she can do. Intermezzo is her most mature novel, and its maturity lies precisely in this widening of sympathy.

Reading Guides

• Sally Rooney Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide (2026)
• Normal People vs Beautiful World Where Are You: Which Sally Rooney Should You Read First?