Matt
I’m gonna be honest here. I picked up this book more out of obligation than excitement. For better or for worse Sally Rooney is an extremely important author at the moment due to the frank way she writes about younger Millennials. There are others like her but Rooney is able to write about these experiences in a very relatable way that connects to a lot of readers. I am one of the few people who think that Rooney’s first novel Conversations With Friends was notably better than her follow-up Normal People, although both are quite strong. However, going into this novel I wasn’t expecting much due to how much I disliked her third book Beautiful World, Where Are You. While reading Beautiful World, I got this feeling that Rooney had totally peaked with Conversations With Friends and any magic she captured with that novel was gone.
For the first 150 pages of Intermezzo, my feelings stayed the same. Something just felt off. And then a switch flipped. The book went from mediocre to outright good. And it just continued to get better. I am not sure exactly what is so different between the first third of the book and the rest of it but I found myself having a blast. I reread passages just to enjoy the writing. I started to totally dig the characters. I cracked up at a few jokes. I got emotionally invested.
I’m really not sure what happened. On paper there is very little to differentiate the Sally Rooney work that I do like (all of Conversations with Friends, a good chunk of Normal People, the final 300 pages of Intermezzo) from the writing of hers I dislike (parts of Normal People, all of Beautiful World, Where Are You, the first third of Intermezzo). Rooney is an author that has one subject matter that she really likes to stick to. Her characters are by-and-large middle-class people in their 20s and 30s in Dublin. They are often very messed up mentally and have struggles in relationships that stem from their mental health issues.
And yet there feels like a marked difference when Rooney just lets the character’s thoughts on the page as opposed to their actions. Rooney’s writing style is fairly weird in that a lot of it is just stream-of-consciousness and that doesn’t work all that well when describing physical actions. If there is one thing I wish she’d do it’s to describe her sex scenes in less detail. I get why the scenes are in there. Rooney’s books are far more character-based than plot-based and any good character-based book needs to have well-defined relationships. Some of these relationships are bound to be sexual in nature. Rooney is putting these scenes in for a reason, the problem is that the scenes don’t work well with her writing style.
Maybe that’s what’s different between the first third and the final two thirds of this book. Rooney is genuinely good at writing a few types of scenes, but there is nothing she is quite as good at as getting in the mind of someone who is having a mental breakdown, and there are so many mental breakdowns in the final 300 pages of this book. These scenes are written with a perfect amount of sympathy and restraint. I think that’s why Rooney is so popular among a certain generation of readers. She just gets what the human mind looks like during periods of crisis and that’s a legitimate talent that not many writers have.
This review itself has itself been kind of stream-of-consciousness but overall I can say I’m a much bigger Sally Rooney fan than I was when I started it, and for that I’m grateful.
I’m gonna be honest here. I picked up this book more out of obligation than excitement. For better or for worse Sally Rooney is an extremely important author at the moment due to the frank way she writes about younger Millennials. There are others like her but Rooney is able to write about these experiences in a very relatable way that connects to a lot of readers. I am one of the few people who think that Rooney’s first novel Conversations With Friends was notably better than her follow-up Normal People, although both are quite strong. However, going into this novel I wasn’t expecting much due to how much I disliked her third book Beautiful World, Where Are You. While reading Beautiful World, I got this feeling that Rooney had totally peaked with Conversations With Friends and any magic she captured with that novel was gone.
For the first 150 pages of Intermezzo, my feelings stayed the same. Something just felt off. And then a switch flipped. The book went from mediocre to outright good. And it just continued to get better. I am not sure exactly what is so different between the first third of the book and the rest of it but I found myself having a blast. I reread passages just to enjoy the writing. I started to totally dig the characters. I cracked up at a few jokes. I got emotionally invested.
I’m really not sure what happened. On paper there is very little to differentiate the Sally Rooney work that I do like (all of Conversations with Friends, a good chunk of Normal People, the final 300 pages of Intermezzo) from the writing of hers I dislike (parts of Normal People, all of Beautiful World, Where Are You, the first third of Intermezzo). Rooney is an author that has one subject matter that she really likes to stick to. Her characters are by-and-large middle-class people in their 20s and 30s in Dublin. They are often very messed up mentally and have struggles in relationships that stem from their mental health issues.
And yet there feels like a marked difference when Rooney just lets the character’s thoughts on the page as opposed to their actions. Rooney’s writing style is fairly weird in that a lot of it is just stream-of-consciousness and that doesn’t work all that well when describing physical actions. If there is one thing I wish she’d do it’s to describe her sex scenes in less detail. I get why the scenes are in there. Rooney’s books are far more character-based than plot-based and any good character-based book needs to have well-defined relationships. Some of these relationships are bound to be sexual in nature. Rooney is putting these scenes in for a reason, the problem is that the scenes don’t work well with her writing style.
Maybe that’s what’s different between the first third and the final two thirds of this book. Rooney is genuinely good at writing a few types of scenes, but there is nothing she is quite as good at as getting in the mind of someone who is having a mental breakdown, and there are so many mental breakdowns in the final 300 pages of this book. These scenes are written with a perfect amount of sympathy and restraint. I think that’s why Rooney is so popular among a certain generation of readers. She just gets what the human mind looks like during periods of crisis and that’s a legitimate talent that not many writers have.
This review itself has itself been kind of stream-of-consciousness but overall I can say I’m a much bigger Sally Rooney fan than I was when I started it, and for that I’m grateful.