I’m quite sure I’m not the _targeted demographic for Sally Rodney’s newest novel Intermezzo, but I’m definitely a fan. Her writing details the inner thoughts of multiple characters as we explore various, complicated relationships. At the heart is the relationship of two brothers about ten years apart who have recently lost their father. As Peter, the older, successful barrister goes through this grieving period with two very different girlfriends, Ivan, a 23 year old, socially awkward chess master forms a relationship with an older woman. Rooney then, like a chess game, moves these five people into both wonderful and awkward positions where the reader is privy to their inner monologues. Intermezzo is “chess tactic where a player makes an unexpected move to force an immediate response from their opponent.” (Google) That fits here and each character has their own example. The writing is fragmented, episodic, and beautifully descriptive, both in setting and characters. This was a nice way to end my year of reading. I will continue to look forward to this incredibly young talent.

Lines

The will to live so much stronger than anyone imagines. Like a kind of death, what happened. A kind of death you survive out of politeness, respect for others, out of selfless love. Christ also survived his own death. And was dignified and exalted.

People get to know each other, things happen, that’s life. The question for Ivan is how to become one of those people, how to live that kind of life.

Pressed against her, his body is thin and tensed and shivering. And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?

She has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by these forces, no longer directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person. Young men can invite her into holiday cottages for sexual reasons. It means nothing. That isn’t true: it means something, but the meaning is unfamiliar.

But then the ideal interlocutor – a friend with no rigid moral beliefs, few or no competing demands on her attention and perhaps a taste for faintly scandalous anecdotes – does not seem to be available to Margaret at present.

How often in his life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand.

Canvas bag over her shoulder bulging, sleeve of a sweatshirt hanging out like a pink cotton tongue.

Her irrepressible love of life, he thinks. Pulling fried chicken apart with oily fingers. Last sip of soft drink rattling in the straw. Or trying on a new dress, the way her body luxuriates in tactility. Pleasure of her own gorgeousness in the mirror. Deep complete joy she finds in being alive. No job, no family support, no fixed address, no state entitlements, no money to finish college. Owner of nothing in the world but her own perfect body. Men, and even other women, and systems, bureaucracies, laws, intent it seems on breaking her, forcing her to accept misery.

Over the rocks at the end of the beach, saltwater crashes with a hissing fracturing sound, and sea spray rises glittering against the grey sky, droplets suspended trembling in the air before they fall.

Nuala lives, to some degree, in a fictitious world acted out for her by a special dramatic troupe consisting of her own children and husband, a world in which none of her loved ones have ever been unhappy, sick, depressed, disappointed, hurt, anxious or frightened.

Allowing his eyes to close he lets out something like a groan hearing them both laughing. Help, says Naomi. My girlfriends have unionised.

we love her. And actually, we kind of need her, I feel. ( )

A deeply personal book that gave me many new perspectives. I despise Sally's writing style of not using any "quotation" marks to denote when a character speaks, which makes it difficult to discern sometimes whether a character is speaking or thinking. Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed the book and was severely emotionally impacted. ( )

I have often joked that Western lit can be divided into two kinds of books: those about lonely men, and those about awesome women.

Here, have both:
The lonely brothers, both wildly successful, starkly intelligent, and emotionally stunted. They'd rather sulk and fight than speak honestly about their feelings.

Not two but three awesome women to try to heal them and help them reach their potential. Which, of course they do.

Where the plot struggles to surprise, the performance carries. The audiobook narrated by Éanna Hardwicke is a masterclass in the various tenors and implications of the word "Hmm." The things that the characters do not say to each other shines through like a second language of non-committal responses.

Deeply indebted to Ulysses' stream of conscious narration and to Shakespeare encyclopedic vocabulary, the brothers' refreshingly distinguishable internal monologues are the novel's soul and it's propulsive force.

A can't put it down family drama. I'd put it on the shelf with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and with Olive Ketteridge. One of the best I've read this year. ( )

Loved it. Amazing character development. I got lost in knowing this circle of 5 people. And the underlying message of acceptance of relationships without complying with social norms was so well crafted.

This would have been a much better story without the 30 something’s having relationships with vulnerable 22 year olds. I don’t get the appeal of hearing about kissing a kid with braces, call me crazy. ( )