Review: “Intermezzo”

I have finished reading the novel “Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney, and I am sitting in the same chair I sat in while reading it, which is also the chair where I think about what it means to have read something like this. Did I like it? A question with moral weight, perhaps. I liked it the way you like a text from someone you want to like you back. The passive-aggressive, or is it aggressively passive, characters in this novel are, at times, likeable in a way that makes you dislike them. This is a talent of Rooney’s, I suppose. To make you complicit. The book is about love. And grief. And money, but obliquely. You get the sense that the characters could, at any time, get on a plane to another country and start over, but they don’t, because then there would be no novel. Instead, they look out of windows. They walk in the drifting rain without umbrellas. They engage in conversations that feel both devastating and mundane. One of them says something so deeply hurtful that you flinch while reading, but it is written in such a plain, declarative sentence that you almost admire it. There is a plot, technically. But if you ask me to summarise it, I will stare at you like you have asked me to summarise a feeling. Things happen, but they don’t happen. Someone loves someone else. Someone else doesn’t know how to love properly. People miscommunicate in a way that is more real than if they communicated well. The way rain holds the light when falling. The way words tumble and flitter away.