Sally Rooney's ‘Intermezzo’: Adulting through grief and love

Thirty-two-year-old barrister Peter Koubek and his brother Ivan, a competitive chess player a decade his junior, share a crippling loss in Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo. Peter is caught between the brilliant academic Sylvia, an old yet elusive love, who suffers untold damage following an accident, and Naomi, a risk-taking 23-year-old college student and illegal squatter who is evicted. Luckily, like most of Rooney’s work, this novel is still readable, thanks to the vivid, breathless quality of her prose and its exacting idiom, particularly in its typically well-articulated sex scenes. View Full Image Sally Rooney speaks onstage during the Hulu Panel at Winter TCA 2020 at The Langham Huntington, Pasadena Intermezzo is strongest when it considers how the accident of birth can force dissimilar individuals into the most consistent bond of their lives.Ivan is wonderfully geeky and conscientious in a way that is easily assimilated with others of his generation.