“Reading this novel,” Sally Rooney wrote in her introduction to Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays, “we get to know its characters as if they were our own friends, or even ourselves. Many of them are trying hard in various ways to figure out what is right and resist what is wrong … These are not people born with special moral qualities,” she goes on, “people who find it easy to be brave and honorable. We know them: we know quite well that they are just as irritable and selfish and lazy as we are.”
I share Rooney’s love of Ginzburg, and it was this shared love that led me to Rooney’s novels, which I had erroneously believed were for zoomers, not boomers like me. In reading her, I soon found that what Rooney observes about Ginzburg, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, might easily be said of Rooney’s own work, even if their contexts—Ginzburg’s wartime and postwar Italy; Rooney’s post-capitalist, post-feminist Ireland—seem eons apart.
Rooney, like Ginzburg, has a penchant for meticulously delineating those idiosyncratic details that render a fictional character simultaneously individual and relatable to all. Both writers have an abiding interest in exploring the nooks and crannies of the female experience while also pushing, cajoling, and manipulating the novel form to see just what it is capable of. Both are extremely ambitious and extremely humble.
“When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone,” writes Ginzburg in her seminal essay “My Vocation.” “But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer.” This quote is the epigraph to Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You?
Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, is predominantly narrated from the points of view of two brothers, Peter and Ivan. Their father has just died, and each brother is navigating his grief. A great part of this entails trying to figure out what kind of man he is going to be in an era in which masculinity remains rigidly defined while, at the same time, up for grabs. As will happen between brothers, each feels existentially threatened by the precarious situation he finds himself in, perceiving the other as his opponent in the game of life. In chess terms, they find themselves facing an “intermezzo,” a sudden attack on everything they thought they knew about the world and their place in it.
Ivan, the younger brother by a decade, is in his early 20s and a “chess genius,” or was on his way to becoming one when he got derailed by his father’s cancer. Peter, a successful human-rights lawyer, avoids dealing with the severe trauma of an accident suffered by Sylvia, the love of his life, which left her in chronic pain and ended their relationship. Over the course of the novel, Ivan falls in love with a much older woman, Peter with a much younger woman. Rooney grapples with the conundrum of romantic love and how it is made up of some mysterious combination of sexual desire, platonic idealization, and friendship that we can never get right.
Rooney’s prose style includes her signature quotation-mark-free dialogue, but in this novel she goes further with her linguistic experimentation. The sections from Peter’s point of view have a diction and rhythm that reflect his fractured self and veer into a frenetic, staccato, pronoun-free stream of consciousness. Ivan’s sections are more lyrical and logical, exemplifying Rooney’s usual limpid prose.
Sally Rooney, like Natalia Ginzburg, has a penchant for meticulously delineating those idiosyncratic details that render a fictional character simultaneously individual and relatable to all.
Rooney is never shy about intertwining the socio-political and the personal. In Intermezzo, the characters’ lives are deeply affected and influenced by a gooey mélange of social mores and contemporary concerns over power dynamics, hierarchies, social and legal justice, capitalism, religion, aging, death, polyamory, disability, the housing crisis, police brutality, drug abuse, social media, game theory, and the medical-industrial complex, to name only a few.
In a 2022 interview, evoking the spirit of Ginzburg, Rooney said, “There are so many things I fail to do in my work. I’d like to be a better writer. But the hardest disappointment is in feeling that I’ve failed to do justice to my characters. I hate the idea of thrusting them out into the cold hard light of publicity to be jeered at and reviled. They really do mean as much to me as if they were real.”
It is a testament to Rooney’s considerable talent that in novel after novel her characters also feel very real to us and linger long after we close the book.
Jenny McPhee is a writer and translator and the director of the Center for Applied Liberal Arts at N.Y.U.’s School of Professional Studies
