A Worthy Excuse

Why this Newsletter is a Day Late (aka Intermezzo)

Some of you might have noticed that this edition is arriving late. I could come up with a fabulous lie, but, as Martha Beck has taught us, the truth holds greater power, so: Rather than spend my weekend writing up the book I’d planned on discussing, plus a recipe, I instead sat in bed for hours and devoured Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. If ever there were a more on-the-nose reason for me to publish late! Nevertheless, it’s an excuse I believe you can all get behind. Because this book is, in my opinion, beyond comparison. Below I mostly write about how the book made me feel, not what the book is about. Zero spoilers.

Read

Read: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, pub. 2024
Buy: Bookshop.org or your local bookstore

I’ve been a fan of Rooney’s since Conversations with Friends was published in 2017. Back then, I’d never read anything like it. I loved Normal People as much (maybe more), Beautiful World less so. Several years and innumerable copycats later, Rooney is alternately credited with and blamed for inventing a genre. You can’t do a 360 in a bookstore without bumping into a work about cynical millennials. 

Books with this much hype are dangerous. They get your hopes up, creating unfair expectations (and poorly designed bucket hats). In rare circumstances, a great book will exceed them. I think this is Rooney’s best yet: an emotionally mature, heart-wrenching exploration of grief and family. Generations of authors prior to Rooney have published gorgeous meditations on the same subjects, but none writes quite like she does, or comes from her distinct perspective as a 33-year-old Marxist Irish woman. When you read her you immediately enter a world of her making. She’s a literary architect, constructing deep-as-hell sentences, using fragments to express emotional stuntedness, filtering experiences through a lens of religion and societal structures for cultural context and depth. Notorious for her removed tone, she manages at once to act as a cold observer while simultaneously pulling you deeper into inner worlds: a circus act in letters, and a writerly feat, given each male character in Intermezzo is utterly unable to access his emotions. 

Intermezzo follows two brothers, 22-year-old chess prodigy Ivan and his brother, 33-year-old human rights lawyer Peter. The book opens on their father’s funeral and unspools from there. Each chapter, written in the third person, switches between Ivan and Peter’s storylines with a few exceptions. Both character’s stories have a different literary tone – Ivan’s more straightforward, Peter’s a series of staccato where neither pronouns nor full sentences exist. Peter’s chapters took me awhile to get into. I found it jarring, overly stylistic and anxiety-inducing at first, even confusing at times (the lack of punctuation leaves much to be desired). But by about page 70 I eased in, and soon enough I was sacrificing sleep to read. 

Rooney uses the 448 pages to weave intricate portraits of both men: how they’re viewed by society, how each brother sees the other, and how each sees himself. The length of the novel allows Rooney to render the brothers so lifelike you half-expect to bump into them at the ATM. It’s amazing to read a book about the inner worlds of men – written by a woman, a feminist, no less – that captures the experience of drowning in misunderstood, unexpressed feelings and the unspooling that can result from emotional alienation. Rooney draws Ivan and Peter’s shared yearning so vividly that, at multiple junctures throughout, I felt a physical wrenching in my chest. The last book about grief I read that hit me this hard was The Year of Magical Thinking. Comparing Rooney to Didion doesn’t feel hyperbolic here. It’s hard to write about what loss feels like, especially from the perspective of two men who, at least at the outset, are incapable of acknowledging that feelings exist.

If I could sum up the bulk of my emotional state while reading this in two words it would be ‘palpable anguish,’ and I mean that as a compliment. Lest you think this all feels too A Little Life-coded, fear not: The lows are low, but there are highs, too, with joy peeking out between the cracks. I turned the last page and wanted to start it again immediately, so rich is the story, so many tiny threads braided. If this is mid-30s Rooney I can only imagine the depths she’ll reach as the decades progress. 

Eat

As I spent the bulk of my weekend reading, I don’t have any new recipes for you. Instead, might I nudge you to use the last of the season’s summer produce and make ratatouille?