Peter and Ivan Koubek are brothers dealing with the recent death of their father. Peter and Ivan aren’t really close because of a ten-year age-gap between them and their vastly different personalities. Peter is a lawyer who works for a big firm but also handles crusades like discrimination cases. He is gregarious, a gifted public speaker, and popular with women. Ivan is a 22-year-old former childhood chess prodigy trying to get his game back in form and finally attain the grandmaster status predicted for him in his youth. Ivan is shy and retreating, strongly principled, and has a hard time relating to other people. It’s a little strange that no one in the novel addresses whether he may be on the autism spectrum, but they don’t.
In the wake of their father’s passing, Peter and Ivan both find themselves in unusual predicaments in their romantic lives. Peter has been trying to move past his relationship with Sylvia, the love of his life. She had some sort of accident (the convenient, literary kind that mysteriously leaves her incapable of having intercourse or children, and susceptible to random bouts of all-encompassing pain at inconvenient times) and broke up with Peter, unwilling to let his life become about her illness. He has since had a string of unserious relationships, but has surprisingly found himself attached to his newest partner, Naomi, a broke university student whose “online modeling” past is somewhat embarrassing to Peter.
Meanwhile, Ivan meets Margaret at a chess tournament in her hometown. She has no interest in or knowledge of the game, but she’s in charge of the local arts centre serving as a venue. Ivan falls for her immediately, and she is flattered and interested as well, but wary. Margaret is 36 and divorced from her alcoholic ex-husband, and she’s worried about what her friends, neighbors, and family will say if they find out about her and Ivan. Ivan, with his over-reliance on logic, can’t see the problem.
When Peter finds out about Ivan’s relationship with Margaret, his unkind response fractures the shaky bond between them and sends them spinning off separately when Ivan blocks his older brother’s number. It’s a real shame, because the book is at its best by far when Ivan and Peter are in conversation with each other. The scenes between them and their romantic partners are not nearly as good, and the long stretches where we are in one or the other’s head are, frankly, interminable. Rooney has an excellent ear for dialogue but her inner monologues are clunky and boring. Her sentences are rendered off-putting through the use of off-kilter word order, almost as if they had been put through a paper shredder and reconstructed by someone unfamiliar with both the original text and the English language. It’s a bewildering artistic choice. Rooney’s abandonment of traditional punctuation is a bit more commonplace, but it still serves the reader poorly in this instance. Rooney doesn’t make it easy for the reader to distinguish what her characters say from what they are merely thinking.
I find myself annoyed at Rooney’s lack of specificity and resolution. As the author, she of course has every right to determine what is and isn’t important for the reader to know. But her choices are pretty darn inscrutable. Why is the cause and nature of Sylvia’s accident such a secret? Even in dialogue, characters refer to it only obliquely, as though it were a scandal. Was it just a car accident, or something more? The specifics of her injuries are also left unsaid. Also unclear is the nature of Peter’s relationship with his recently deceased dad. At times it is described as difficult. Peter’s mother, divorced and re-married, reassures her son that his father “tried his best.” But the reader gets no further insight.
All three major female character’s are short-changed by Rooney. Naomi’s difficult family life is brought up in passing without elaboration. The reader is left to make the connection to her exhibitionism and interest in rough sex using trite, dime-store psychology. Sylvia veers between perfectly competent and extremely illogical depending on Rooney’s needs, and Margaret, so sexy and alluring to Ivan, comes across on the page as a near non-entity. Outside of the basic human empathy for a much put-upon woman, there’s little to get the reader to care about Margaret.
This is Rooney’s fourth novel, and is perhaps a worrying sign of her declining skill. Normal People was a triumph of precision and subtlety, but both her third novel (Beautiful World, Where are You?) and this one have been packed with silly, irritating people who don’t feel halfway near as real as Marianne and Connell. Rooney made headlines recently by saying she would not be agreeing to any more filmed adaptations of her work. My main reaction in light of reading Intermezzo is, who on earth would want to put this on TV?