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Thursday, February 20, 2025

Review: Characters in ‘Intermezzo’ define themselves through each other — and then reject the search for meaning altogether

The novel finds and examines the virtue in giving up on making sense of things 

 

BY JULIE HUANG – arts@theaggie.org

 

Sally Rooney’s latest novel, “Intermezzo,” is, in the broadest sense, about the futility of humanity’s enduring attempts to make sense out of an ultimately senseless world, with the possibility of abandoning the eternal quest for meaning altogether. Rooney’s novel delivers its existential take through the vessel of a more down-to-earth, familiar narrative: the story of a disjointed family, with two brothers who have grown apart as they grow older. 

Peter Koubek, a lawyer in his 30s, and Ivan Koubek, a 22-year-old competitive chess player, have both chosen to dismiss their deteriorated brotherly relationship at the cost of increasingly negative mental and external consequences for both. That is, until the grief of their father’s death, which has been looming over the course of the novel, finally forces them to address their issues with each other. 

The two male protagonists are introduced to the reader and then continually developed through their participation in socially unconventional and perhaps questionable relationships with the women in their lives. Peter is romantically juggling a situation with his complicated long-term best friend and college ex-girlfriend Sylvia, as well as a passionate stint with college student Naomi. Meanwhile, Ivan’s first appearance in the novel details his meeting Margaret, an older woman recently separated from her husband, who is also serving as the event coordinator for the chess match Ivan’s currently participating in. Of course, Ivan is immediately attracted to Margaret and they begin a scandalous age-gap relationship, which bothers Ivan less than it does Margaret. 

The majority of the novel’s characterization occurs within the framework of this emotionally complicated and socially unacceptable romance between these men and women, which can raise an uncomfortable and perhaps frustrating feeling that the novel’s female characters exist solely to illustrate the depth of Peter and Ivan’s emotional basins. 

 In a sense, they do. Opposites in personality, presentation and proclaimed inner values, the brothers are strikingly alike in how they perceive their female counterparts in the narrative. At times, Peter and Ivan perceive Sylvia, Naomi and Margaret as people with merits and flaws, but the brothers love these women best and most consistently because they are emotionally useful. They have the amazing capacity of acting as magic mirrors through which the emotionally inept brothers can perceive the flow of their own lives more clearly and finally make sense of turbulent emotions that have been magnified through the intensity of their romantic and sexual passions for the women in their lives. 

The novel’s pages contain no judgment or explicit condemnation of its characters for their selfishness, only a gentle curiosity for the way the male characters’ emotional arcs reflect the real phenomenon of how men look to women to grant their lives meaning. Peter and Ivan, too afraid, apathetic or self-loathing to face each other or their deeply embedded neuroses, find through relationships with Sylvia, Naomi and Margaret a purpose. This purpose valorizes and transforms them from fallible men into lovers and protectors, a reason for living that validates their past unrelated failures and illusory sense of heading in the “right” direction. In other words, the female characters provide what the male characters cannot give themselves: the tantalizing idea that life is building up to an ultimate culmination of something. 

Without commenting on the dubiousness of their choices to continue engaging in these relationships, “Intermezzo” presents this subtle explanation of why Peter and Ivan cling so vehemently onto their respective romances — because they perceive these women as possessing a unique attribute to bring them clarity and contentment, when really what they are feeling is the sense of self-harmony that they have lost over the years. 

To bring a new perspective to this idea of using others to create personal meaning, Rooney intermittently provides the reader with Margaret’s narration on her questionable romance with younger Ivan, using Margaret’s conflicted thoughts on her feelings for Ivan to reflect how the male characters perceive the female characters. Like the brothers dealing with the loss of their father, Margaret has recently faced loss: she has separated from her alcoholic husband, and in losing her established family, she has lost her sense of identity, floating adrift until she meets Ivan. Although his adoring worship of her brings her some solace, it does not abate but rather brings a whole new slew of worries. Has she done something morally unsalvageable by entering a sexual relationship with a man so much younger than her? Is she past redemption?

Margaret begins the novel as a woman who has lost her marriage and thus doubts the entirety of her previous identity, fearing that if she made such a mistake as marrying the wrong man, she may have lived the whole of her life entirely wrong. Her spontaneous decision to be intimate with Ivan then seals the sense of loss of identity completely — by doing something completely unexpected, she has made a choice she did not know she ever would make and finds herself no longer recognizable. 

Driven by the desperation of wanting to identify with something but finding all the old haunts irrevocably changed, Margaret turns to Ivan for a sense of personhood. If before she was defined by her husband, then now she is defined by her relationship with Ivan, even if that makes her a “cougar” or some sort of seductress, instead of the dutiful long-suffering wife that she formerly was with her alcoholic husband. 

Thus, the most compelling argument that “Intermezzo” could make for the rejection of the endless search for meaning and the falseness of organizing one’s life around some pre-existing expectation, lies in the unsavory results of its characters’ own subscription to these rejected beliefs. Without explicitly judging or condemning its characters for their modes of extravagant self-destruction, “Intermezzo” nonetheless showcases the pain and heartache that its characters feel and then bring to each other. This is an illustration of how hurtful and dangerous it can be to fool oneself into believing that everything in life, including oneself, can be easily reduced into artificial roles and frameworks. 

Not content to end on this moral note, “Intermezzo” goes further to suggest that, no matter the previous energy or belief that one has devoted to making life make sense, no one is ever completely trapped by the choices of their past. This attitude of acceptance and finding the strength to move on is shown most clearly in Margaret’s character arc, which ends in her reflecting that Ivan is not an escape from the pain of her past entirely but rather simply a new experience, which cannot in itself guarantee what her future will become. Coming to the conclusion that their relationship is not all-defining then allows her to enjoy the positive experiences more openly, without the risk of losing her entire identity, because her identity no longer belongs to any specific circumstance or choice. 

Though possessing less emotional clarity and perhaps maturity, the brothers are allowed similar endings to their arcs. Peter muses on the “conceptual collapse of one thing into another, all things into one,” which is his own way of accepting that his own definitions of himself, his brother, his job and his romantic relationships are ultimately enforced by no one but himself and can be abandoned if they start to hurt him or others. Ivan circles the idea when he points out the flaw in using human creations like language to assign order to the inherently chaotic arena of existence: “All words can give a false picture, and who’s to say what picture another person ends up with, even when the supposedly right words are used?”

Early on in “Intermezzo,” the novel itself boldly asks, “What if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?” 

We want things to make sense. We want there to be a formulaic system from which the answers can be retrieved, but there is no ideal system of signs and no infallible language to speak that will doubtlessly bring understanding. In “Intermezzo,” the characters’ desire to make sense of their lives and of each other casts shadows of doubt upon their morality, but it is the deeper desire to know that they are still connected to the world and to each other that ultimately redeems them. 

“Intermezzo” is concerned with separating the pursuit of happiness from the desire to be right. It tries to banish the notion that one can hold the right expectations and place the circumstances of life within the right framework. The novel is about choices and how we define ourselves by choices we have already made, which is why we are often surprised when we find that we still have a chance to choose again.

 

Written by: Julie Huang — arts@theaggie.org 

 

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