Intermezzo by Sally Rooney Book Review
- Danielle Robinson
- May 2
- 6 min read
Grief doesn’t arrive cleanly in Intermezzo. Nor does it announce itself or demand attention in the way we expect it to. It seeps, it rearranges and it sits quietly inside conversations that seem to be about something else entirely, like sex, money, timing, responsibility, up until you realise every choice being made is orbiting a loss no one quite knows how to hold.
Sally Rooney’s fourth novel follows two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, in the aftermath of their father’s death, but calling it a novel about grief feels too contained for what it’s doing. This is a book about what happens when the structures people rely on, like language, relationships, identity, and even time itself, stop behaving the way they’re supposed to. Or perhaps more accurately, when you realise they actually never did.
Peter, the older brother, is a human rights lawyer in Dublin who appears, at first glance at least, to have everything under control. He's articulate, he's socially adept, and he's professionally respected. But his private life is built on a quiet, unsustainable contradiction. He's still emotionally tethered to Sylvia, his former partner, whose life, and subsequently their relationship, was altered by a car accident that left her living with chronic pain. At the same time, he's involved with Naomi, a much younger woman navigating financial instability, whose presence in his life is as much about need as it is about desire.
Ivan, by contrast, exists slightly outside the social world Peter moves through with such ease. He's a 22-year-old chess player, who is precise and inward, and is also grieving, though in a way that feels less performative and more destabilising. When he meets Margaret, a 36-year-old woman working at a rural arts centre, their relationship begins almost tentatively, then gathers a kind of soft intensity that neither of them fully trusts.
On the surface, these are two separate romantic plots, but in reality, they're mirrors. Not in the obvious sense like the age gaps, and the imbalance of experience, but in the way each relationship exposes something about how these brothers understand themselves, and each other.
Peter believes himself to be a protector. It 's a role that shapes both his career and his personal life, so he supports Naomi financially, looks after Sylvia when her pain becomes unmanageable, and assumes, almost automatically, that he must intervene in Ivan’s life when he learns about Margaret. But Rooney is precise in how she dismantles this instinct because what Peter calls care often edges into control. What he frames as responsibility is, often a way of avoiding vulnerability without authority, which is something he finds much more difficult to face.
Ivan’s arc moves in the opposite direction. We see that where Peter is defined by overreach, our relationship with Ivan begins in hesitation. He's spent years within the rigid logic of chess, which a world where every move has a consequence, and every pattern can be studied, so he finds himself unprepared for the far less legible dynamics of real life. His relationship with Margaret becomes a way of testing himself against that uncertainty. Not just sexually or emotionally, but existentially. He wants to know if he can choose something fully, without waiting for permission or certainty.
Margaret’s presence shifts the tone of the novel in a way that feels almost imperceptible at first. Her life in Clogherkeen is small, and contained, and observed. She's not unhappy in any dramatic sense, but she's quietly accepted a version of her life that feels finished. What Ivan disrupts isn't simply her routine, but more her sense of what remains possible. And yet, Rooney resists the easy narrative of reinvention because Margaret isn't naïve. She understands the imbalance, the scrutiny, and the likelihood that this relationship won't fit neatly into any future she can describe. What she chooses isn't certainty, but she ultimately chooses risk.
Naomi, perhaps the most underestimated figure in the novel, operates with a clarity the others often lack. She understands the material realities shaping her life, such as housing instability, and financial dependence with the knowledge of how those realities bleed into intimacy. Her relationship with Peter is explicitly transactional at times, but never purely so. What makes it compelling is that both of them know this, and continue anyway. There's affection, there's attraction, and there's also negotiation. Rooney allows all of it to coexist without flattening it into a moral lesson.
And then there's Sylvia, who might be the novel’s quiet centre. She exists in a space Peter can't reconcile, where she's loved and desired, but unwilling to re-enter the life he imagines for them. Her chronic pain has altered her relationship to her own body, and as such also to intimacy, and to time. She refuses to pretend otherwise. What she offers instead is a relationship that doesn't conform to the categories Peter wants to place it in. Not quite in the past, not quite committed to the present, so can't be easily named.
This is where Intermezzo becomes most interesting by refusing to let language settle anything. Rooney threads a recurring philosophical problem through the novel that circles around the limits of truth and description. It’s not there for ornament because every relationship in this book resists definition. There's the girlfriend, the ex, the brother, and the lover. The words exist, but they fail to hold the full shape of what’s happening.
Peter, in particular, feels this failure acutely. His instinct is to resolve, to decide, and to reduce complexity into something manageable. But every attempt he makes to do this collapses. Choosing Sylvia doesn't negate Naomi, and ending one relationship doesn't t clarify the other. Even his role as a brother, that he perceives as a protector, an elder, and a figure of authority, is challenged in ways he can't easily recover from.
The novel doesn’t punish him for this, but it doesn’t excuse him either. Instead, it slowly and uncomfortably moves him towards a different way of existing. An existence that's not built on certainty, but on tolerance for contradiction.
The ending reflects this shift because it doesn't give us a resolution in the traditional sense. No relationship is neatly defined, nor is a future guaranteed, but what changes is the characters’ willingness to remain inside the uncertainty rather than forcing it into something legible.
If Rooney’s earlier work often traced the tension between intimacy and communication, Intermezzo pushes further. It suggests that the problem isn't just what we fail to say, but what can't be articulated at all. That experience, especially when it comes to love, grief, and dependency, will always exceed the language available to describe it.
What's left then, isn't clarity, but a kind of quiet acceptance. We grow to learn that life may not resolve into meaning, that relationships may not fit the structures we’ve inherited, and that care can look like control, and control can disguise fear. But we also realise that sometimes, the most honest thing you can do is continue without fully understanding what it is you’re continuing.
It’s a subtle novel, but it's definitely not a small one. It stays not because it answers anything, but because it leaves you sitting inside the questions a little longer than you expect to.
Book Details
Title — Author Intermezzo — Sally Rooney
Paperback ISBN: 978-0571375660 (Faber & Faber; UK/AU edition, may vary by region)
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0571375646 (Faber & Faber; first edition, varies by region)
eBook ISBN: 978-0571375653
Genre: Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction
Tropes / Literary Threads: Sibling dynamics; grief and loss; age-gap relationship; emotional infidelity; intellectual intimacy; moral ambiguity; power imbalance; economic precarity; quiet character study; anti-resolution narrative; non-traditional relationships; interiority-driven storytelling
Publisher: Faber & Faber (UK/AU) / Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US)
Series: Standalone
Formats Available: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Audiobook
Audiobook Narrator: Éanna Hardwicke (may vary by region/edition)
Release Date: September 24, 2024
Page Count: Approx. 432 pages (varies slightly by edition)
Awards & Recognition: International bestseller; widely praised for its emotional depth, philosophical framing, and evolution of Rooney’s narrative style
Where to Buy (Australia): Available via Amazon AU, Booktopia, Dymocks, QBD Books, Big W, World of Books, Audible, and independent bookstores across Australia
Danielle Robinson is a literary critic, writer, and interior curator whose work explores the relationship between literature, home, and heritage through a reflective lens. Holding a double degree in philosophy and theology, she brings academic rigour to her writing alongside a cultivated, deeply aesthetic sensibility. Danielle is an internationally published, multi-award-winning makeup artist and former fashion stylist and interior stager, with over 30 years’ experience shaping visual and cultural spaces. She reads widely and rigorously, reviewing more than 200 books each year as both an ARC reader and commissioned critic. Through her platform and podcast, Silk & Sentences, she considers literature not simply as text, but as atmosphere—something that informs the way we live, curate, and remember. She writes from her meticulously curated rural Queensland home, where she lives with Alex, her husband of 33 years, her dog, Oscar, and surrounded by family & close friends at every opportunity.
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