InterludeBringing Expectation, Sally Rooney’s first new book in three years. what will happen to us The first great novelist of the millennium To do next? Will his new offering leave readers as emotionally drained as his previous works?
Rooney, who is Irish, writes elegant, emotionally rich novels, mostly about young people in Dublin struggling to navigate their endlessly fraught love lives under late capitalism. His first two novels, Conversation with friends (2017) and ordinary people (2018), both were runaway successes. They are adaptive injury Started TV show and career Their young star. Professionally nice person Carrying books around to get picturesWith strategically placed covers, like they were the new handbag of the season. With his last offer, 2021 Beautiful world, where are you?Her publishers took accessorizing literally: Big name influencers can score one beautiful world bucket hat and a beautiful world Tote bag to go with them beautiful world book
Rooney is that rare creature, the unicorn of the 21st century, a celebrity author of literary fiction. Any of his new books faces a certain amount of inevitable scrutiny: After all this time, does he still live up to the hype?
I am happy to report that Interlude Experimental and polarizing while subtle beautiful world Its characters stay out of mind, with sometimes chilling results. Interlude All rich inner monologues, as deeply felt ordinary people.
What’s more, it offers something Rooney seems to have been searching for for a long time: a new way of moving through the central concerns of his work. Here, love is made through familial relationships rather than mere romance, with male characters rather than dry intellectual women – and Rooney for the first time appears ready to stop apologizing for the romanticism of his work.
Rooney’s earlier novels have played with Austen/Brontë tropes. In ordinary peopleCollege students Connell and Marianne are clearly meant for each other, but they keep drifting apart partly because of their class differences. In Conversation with friendsYoung Frances must navigate her love for older, married Nick. It is the material of the 19th-century England wedding novel, updated with text and Marxism.
InterludeIn contrast, a dramatization of the great Russian novel. It is interested in questions about God, how we care for each other, and what gives life meaning.
in the center Interlude Two brothers, Peter and Ivan, are lapsed Catholics who are struggling with the recent death of their father. Peter, 32, a lawyer, is adamant about the cut of his suit and the fabric of his scarf, and the way he smiles at strangers, to “reveal a decent personality to the world.” Evan is 22 and painfully awkward, still wearing braces, and finds himself almost unable to interact with other people.
“Some sort of panache in his total disregard for the material world,” Peter thinks of Evan. “Peter is a man who moves along the surface of life very easily,” Ivan thinks of Peter. As a pair, they form a kind of study of the different ways in which self-loathing can manifest: either through indifference to the outside world or through subtle attention to it.
We meet Peter and Ivan shortly after their father’s funeral, but they both have other issues to deal with. Peter is still in love with his ex-girlfriend Sylvie, but after a vaguely described traumatic injury leaves him unable to have sex, he breaks up with her. (The kind of plot devices you can get away with when you’re Sally Rooney!) Now he’s caught up with Naomi, a college student and camgirl, and fears she might fall in love with him, too.
All this Rooney describes in textured, impressionistic sentence fragments, thoughts flying through Peter’s mind like the birds you see fluttering across a window pane, there and then gone. “The old life of joy is gone and will never return,” Peter thinks as he waits to meet the lost Sylvie: “Accept, or deceive yourself, in the end all the same. The will to live is more than anyone can imagine. Much stronger.” He contemplates suicide, and whether God will forgive him for it.
Meanwhile, Ivan, a once precocious teenage chess prodigy who has seen his ranking drop in recent years, lives his life in complete sentences, piled upon clauses, his inner monologue so sweetly innocent as to become transparent. Ivan thinks of himself, “He seems to have formed himself with something other than life in mind. “He has his good qualities, of sorts, but none of them have much to do with living in the world that he actually lives in, the only world that can be called in a fairly real way.”
Plot devices you can get away with when you’re Sally Rooney!
Evan finds himself steadily more depressed about living a life organized around chess, as he feels he probably reached his peak at age 15. His life begins to take a turn when he meets 36-year-old Margaret, an elegant divorcee living in a small town where Ivan plays an exhibition chess game. Margaret becomes a third point-of-view character Interlude“His hands look as precise and elegant as those of a surgeon or a pianist,” reflects on her bewildered attraction to Ivan and how to play chess in calm, polished sentences.
Their developing relationship is liberating for Ivan, who has always considered himself beneath the gaze of women, but devastating to Margaret’s reputation in her conservative town. And while Peter himself is dating a college student, he doesn’t think it makes sense that he would want anything to do with Evan, a “normal woman” Margaret’s age. The brothers’ out-of-control fight over Margaret spirals about their whole lives: how they took care of their father, how they should take care of the family dog, what they owe each other.
A major question in this novel is the question of God. Evan thinks he can find God when he plays really good chess: “It seems that the sequence is so deep and it’s so beautiful, I think there must be something underneath.”
Margaret, meanwhile, says she doesn’t think of God when it comes to beauty. “I think my idea of God has more to do with morality. What exactly is wrong,” he says. This binary between beauty and morality has traditionally been at the center of Rooney’s novels. His books are concerned with whether it is right to live a life focused on aesthetic pleasures – playing chess like Ivan or writing stories like Connell Inn. ordinary people– When there is a lot wrong with the world and a lot of political work to be done. By extension, they are obsessed with the novel as an art form that exists so that their readers can experience beauty.
“It seems intellectually odd to concern yourself with fictional people marrying each other,” Connell muses ordinary people When he finds himself in a “strange state of emotional agitation” over Jane Austen emma. Meanwhile, the celebrity novelist Alice announced beautiful world That the problem with Western contemporary literature is that it relies on “suppressing the lived reality of most people in the world,” denies his own work an insufficient engagement with real human suffering.
His books are concerned with whether it is right to live a life focused on aesthetic pleasure when so much is wrong with the world.
Is it okay, Rooney’s novels are strangely, disturbingly prone to dedicating your life to the beauty of the novel, when perhaps the only morally right thing to do in our current society is to start a Marxist revolution and blow up the pipelines?
Surprisingly, though, in InterludeRooney introduces this binary and then almost immediately breaks it down. “To me, it seems like it could all be related,” Evan says. “Like, I don’t know, finding beauty in life, maybe it’s about right and wrong.” As the novel progresses, Rooney continues to develop this idea: that perhaps we should embrace the things in life that are beautiful and bring us joy, even if other people may think they are wrong, and that perhaps this will lead us to be righteous like God. understand it.
In chess, an intermezzo is an “intermediate” move that turns a game in an unexpected direction. A way of reading Rooney Interlude It could be part of a bridge between the books she wrote in her 20s and what was to come in her 30s: novels that wondered if they had a right to exist, and books that apologized for them: a rich understanding of love. Made novels and friendships and the way that both can complete us as people. Among these, Interlude A book works beautifully on its own. It’s as tender and lovely as you could ask for, and beneath the elegant rise and fall of Rooney’s ocean sentences, the waters run deep.
