Sally Rooney’s Millennials Grow Up

Rooney was in her early twenties when she wrote Conversations With Friends, which is narrated by the young woman. Throughout her career, Rooney has been celebrated as a specifically millennial novelist, and her novels have
mostly focused on characters in their twenties as they come of age in the decade
following the 2008 financial crisis. Her characters fall in love, fall out with
friends, achieve literary success, and debate the relationship between their
politics and their personal lives. The protagonists of Rooney’s last book, Beautiful
World, Where Are You, were daunted by the approach of 30, though still
wrestling with many of the same concerns.

Today, most millennials are solidly in their fourth
decade—and in Intermezzo, the perspective of the young woman is closed
off to us. We see her relationship only through the perspective of her older almost-boyfriend,
Peter. Set in the immediate aftermath of Peter’s father’s death, this novel is Rooney’s
most somber: more attentive to what can’t be undone or recouped, no longer
convinced that success is just around the corner. Its characters learn to make
peace with the world rather than dazzle it. The novel itself, the longest of
Rooney’s books, lacks the dazzle of her previous works: Next to the tightness
and momentum of Conversations With Friends and Normal People, it feels
baggy and sometimes repetitive. Yet this bagginess allows Rooney to show how
power operates not only within but also between relationships, as she follows the
interplay of romantic and familial ties in the wake of grief and loss. 

Peter Koubek
is a brilliant junior barrister living in Dublin. The young woman he’s dating
is Naomi, a beautiful student at risk of eviction, who occasionally makes money
by posting explicit photos of herself online. But Peter is also in love with
Sylvia, a brilliant academic (main characters in Rooney’s novels are usually
brilliant or beautiful, sometimes both). Peter and Sylvia met at university, where—like Rooney herself—they were debating champions. They had a blissfully
happy relationship until, at 26, Sylvia was in a road accident that left
her with chronic and often excruciating pain, and an inability to have
penetrative sex. Not long after the accident, Sylvia broke up with Peter, who
has since had a parade of hot girlfriends, culminating in Naomi. Sylvia and
Peter, meanwhile, have continued to be best friends. When the novel opens,
they’ve just started semi-chastely sharing a bed.