Hester Styles Vickery
Formal People
.
Intermezzo, Sally Rooney, Faber & Faber, 2024, pp.432, £20.00.
.
Sally Rooney is one of the most talked over novelists of the last decade. Conversations around her work centre on her significant success, her Marxist politics, but rarely her technique. Rooney’s critics seem reluctant to talk about her sentences, which is unfortunate, because the sentences are very good. There’s even less discussion of the architecture of her novels, her experiments with form. When style comes into it all, it tends to be complaints about the lack of quotation marks. Rooney’s work is often accused of being one note, and it’s superficially true that all four of her novels are about young Irish people having sex and conversations, usually but not exclusively in Dublin. What distinguishes each from each other, beyond the obvious differences in plot and character, is their form. No two of her novels are the same in this respect, and as time goes on Rooney’s writing has also become more explicitly experimental. Intermezzo is her most stylistic yet.
The novel follows two brothers, Peter and Ivan, introduced to us at their father’s funeral. Ivan is, or was, a chess prodigy, worried about slipping into obscurity at twenty two. His brother describes him as ‘kind of autistic, although I guess you can’t say that now.’ Peter is older, thirty six and a lawyer, and though the more apparently capable of the pair, he’s also the more unmoored by their father’s death. Loss has rendered the brothers deeply at odds with each other, unsure how to conduct their relationship without their father in common. Though Peter and Ivan believe themselves to be irretrievably different, there’s an odd symmetry to their romantic lives. Over the course of the novel both find themselves in relationships that might not survive scrutiny. In the wake of the funeral Ivan meets Margaret, fourteen years older than him and recently out from under a difficult marriage. There’s something very Irish about Margaret’s vulnerability to what other’s think of her in her Leitrim town. It’s the kind of dilemma you might expect in a novel by Colm Tóibín, almost historical. Peter’s issues, on the other hand, are thoroughly modern. He’s sleeping with Naomi, a student with an OnlyFans page and an illegal tenancy agreement, who sometimes plies him for money. But he is also still involved, by some definitions of the word, with his university girlfriend, Sylvia, whose catastrophic accident in her twenties ended their apparently perfect relationship.
So far, so Rooney. But the thing that’s most striking about Intermezzo is Rooney’s prose style. Sections of the novel are organised around Ivan, Peter and Margaret’s perspectives, a close third person that borders on stream of consciousness. Those familiar, absent quotation marks blur the divide between thought and speech on the page. Pronouns fall away. This effect is especially pronounced in Peter’s perspective. One begins:
In the morning, hiss of the iron, buttered bread roll, milligram of alprazolam, blue tie or green. Stands at the dining table rearranging his papers while the coffee cools, thoughts running rapid with broken phrases, details of argument, streams diverging and recrossing, hands clammy touching the pages.
Some of these ‘broken phrases’ in Peter’s mind are quotations, integrated into the text and acknowledged in the back of the book, sentences lifted from Wittgenstein and Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy, even a little Lana Del Rey. The echoes feed into the prose’s associative, faintly Joycean quality. It’s a distinct departure from the neat, lucid sentences of her earlier work, but then each of Rooney’s novels has proved to be a stylistic jump from the one preceding it.
You might describe Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations With Friends, as a version of Naomi and Peter’s relationship in Intermezzo from the alternate perspective – Frances is a twenty-one-year-old conducting an affair with a man in his thirties, a situation complicated by her lingering closeness to her ex-girlfriend, his depression and the reality of his wife – though Frances feels like a far more real person than Naomi. This is probably because Conversations With Friends is entirely told through Frances’ first person perspective. From the outside Frances appears ‘bored and interesting’. Internally, she’s anxious, often in pain, never quite sure whether she is in possession of a ‘real personality’. Perhaps this disconnect between her exterior and interior selves is the reason she fails to imagine the people around her accurately. The novel’s late stage turn relies on the realisation, for Frances and the reader – since Frances’ prejudices and evasions are our own – of just how badly she’s misread the dynamics of her own relationships. ‘You underestimate your own power so you don’t have to blame yourself for treating other people badly,’ her friend and lover Bobbi tells her. ‘You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi’s rich, Nick’s a man, I can’t hurt these people.’ In this novel form and affect, plot and character, are all inextricably enmeshed.
In Normal People, Rooney shifts into third person, where she’s mostly stayed since. That novel occurs in chaptered hand-offs between its protagonists, Connell and Marianne, so we can better observe their mutual misunderstandings, watching over several years as they miss each other by small degrees. Set pieces unfold in the present tense, in scenes which simultaneously catch you up on what’s been happening in the ‘Four Months’, ‘Two Days’ or ‘Five Minutes’ between sections. At times you can see Rooney’s authorial hand a little too obviously at work, moving Connell and Marianne into places where they might best misinterpret each other’s good intentions. Our complete knowledge of both characters’ interior lives also means that the novel lacks Conversations With Friends’ thrills of revelation. As Adam Mars-Jones pointed out in an LRB review in 2018, ‘It also has the effect, here, of undermining the principle it is supposed to illustrate: it offers the reader privileged access to two sets of thinking patterns, while the book goes on insisting that people are always mysterious to each other, however intimate and tenderly disposed they may be.’
Conversations With Friends and Normal People were published on top of each other and written in the vacuum before Rooney’s star began to rise, but Beautiful World, Where Are You, released in 2021, exists in response to her significant success, and is more formally ambitious than its predecessors, or at least more pointedly so. The novel is half epistolary and half a clever kind of third-person exteriority. Aside from one scene, Rooney only narrates the surface of the novel’s action – dialogue, gestures, descriptions of settings, but no interiority at all. These withheld thoughts and feelings are coloured in by emails sent between Alice and Eileen, inseparable at university and now living on opposite sides of the country, as they tell and fail to tell each other about their unfolding romantic encounters with men in Dublin and County Mayo. Part of the fun of this formal choice is its resemblance to the roots of the novel form itself, the kind of thing that Intermezzo’s Sylvia might teach in her Trinity seminars on ‘Sexuality and the Origins of the Novel’ and that Rooney herself touched on in her T. S. Eliot Lecture, ‘Misreading Ulysses’, in 2022. The 19th-century novel, to which Rooney has always been explicitly indebted, emerged from the various competing literary traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries, with authors hammering out how story and character might best be delivered to the reader with each new publication. If one were to criminally simplify over a hundred years of fiction, by the 18th century these early novels tended to fall into two categories. In one corner there was the work of Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe – often episodic, broad in scope, with character subordinated to plot and incident – and in the other the epistolary tradition of authors like Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney. These novels-in-letters peddled in psychological realism, offering access to a character’s innermost thoughts, only lightly mediated by the imagined performance of letter writing. In Beautiful World, Where Are You it feels as if Rooney has stripped her own fiction down to these essential structures: epistolary on the one hand and incident on the other. It’s a compelling concept and one that works, up to a point. There’s an undeniable pleasure to comparing Beautiful World, Where Are You’s two formal strands, noticing as the characters fail to mention something, and to whom they fail to mention it, or seeing an emotional position emerge that we might otherwise only have guessed at. When the epistolary sections flounder it’s only because the two voices are never quite dissimilar enough to entirely sustain their verisimilitude. Who, exactly, is holding forth about general systems collapse is rarely clear from the style of Alice and Eileen’s emails. Sometimes, however, the conscious exteriority really sings. Midway through the novel Rooney sends two characters off into another room, leaving the reader behind:
She followed him into his room and he shut the door behind them, saying something inaudible. She laughed, and through the door her laughter was softened and musical. In the darkness the main room of the apartment lay quiet again and still. Two empty bowls had been left in the sink, two spoons, an empty water glass with a faint print of clear lip balm on the rim. Through the door the sound of conversation murmured on, the words rounded out, indistinct, and by one in the morning silence had fallen. At half past five the sky began to lighten in the east-facing living room window, from black to blue and then to silvery white. Another day. The call of a crow from an overhead power line. The sound of buses in the street.
It’s both a beautiful scene and a reminder that we cannot get too close to these characters, making our distance from them real on the page.
In Intermezzo, Rooney brings this distance down to line level. It’s not just the frequent lack of pronouns, but phrases like, ‘Lofty the tone in her voice.’; ‘Bright and cool Naomi’s eyes.’; ‘Slurring he can hear in some of his own consonants now, the pills, the alcohol.’ It reads like a syntactical delay tactic, in which the subject of the sentence pops up later than you might expect it. This appears throughout the novel, though more noticeably in Peter’s sections, reflecting the slippage of self he’s obviously suffering. It strikes a balance between proximity to Peter – experiencing the world as he experiences it – and distance to him, as the self-conscious style reminds us that this is only prose. This particular sentence structure also starts to grate after a dozen or so repetitions. All of it feels like a considered choice on Rooney’s part, of course, but perhaps not a very good one.
Equally, this experimentation with proximity and distance at the level of form reflects a broader engagement on Rooney’s part. Our knowledge of other people and their remoteness from us, the private world of a relationship and its limits, has always been one of Rooney’s primary subjects. Much of her work is concerned with the ways our need for connection is contorted into the shapes suggested by traditional relationships. Love’s formal limits. In her first book, Bobbi and Frances take to asking each other ‘what is a friend? … What is a conversation?’ and in doing so give that novel its title. These questions, in some form or another, have run through all of Rooney’s novels, and find their own expression in Intermezzo. What is a brother? What is a relationship? What is a novel?
There’s much to enjoy in Sally Rooney’s willingness to ask these questions, to make these formal leaps, to challenge her audience. Never to discuss these aspects of her fiction would be a waste. She is an excellent writer, and a more interesting one than her popularity, or her critics, might suggest. It’s commendable that she has responded to her massive success by constantly pushing the formal envelope, and nice to imagine that fans of hers, who would otherwise stick with commercial fiction, might encounter Rooney as an avenue into a more inventive and consciously stylistic kind of prose. It’s probably also more fun for her to write, and even when you can feel her over-reaching, it’s fun to watch her do it.
.
.
.
Sally Rooney is the author of the novels Conversations with Friends, Normal People, Beautiful World, Where Are You and Intermezzo. She was the winner of the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017. Normal People (‘the literary phenomenon of the decade’, Guardian) was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2019, won the Costa Novel of the Year 2018 and the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award 2019. Sally Rooney co-wrote the television adaptation of Normal People which was broadcast on the BBC in 2020.
Hester Styles Vickery is writing a PhD on T. S. Eliot’s Victorian influences. She moved to Dublin last week.
To read this and more, buy our latest print issue here, or subscribe to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.