Intermezzo

Starred review from July 22, 2024
Bestseller Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement (after Beautiful World, Where Are You). After their father dies, brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek drift further apart. Peter, 32, is a depressed Dublin lawyer torn between his college girlfriend, Sylvia, who broke up with him with after she suffered a disabling accident six years earlier, and 23-year-old Naomi, a sometime sex worker. Ivan, 22, is a socially inept pro chess player whose wunderkind status is in doubt when he meets and falls for 36-year-old near-divorcée Margaret at a tournament. Peter’s reflexive disapproval of the age gap in Ivan and Margaret’s relationship causes a permanent rift, and Rooney crosscuts between their perspectives as they ruminate on their father’s death and their complicated romances. The novel’s deliberate pacing veers from the propulsiveness of Normal People and the deep character work contrasts with the topicality of Beautiful World, but in many ways this feels like Rooney’s most fully realized work, especially as she channels the modernist styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Underlining Peter’s rudderlessness, she writes, “Lamplight. Walking her to the library under the trees. Live again one day of that life and die. Cold wind in his eyes stinging like tears. Woman much missed.” Moreover, her focus on Peter and Ivan’s complicated fraternal bond pays enormous dividends. Even the author’s skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel’s forceful currents of feeling.

August 1, 2024
Two brothers--one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy--work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other. Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers' relationship widen. "Complete oddball" Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she's best at--sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues--with newer moves. Having the book's protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter's point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: "Must wonder what he's really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.") The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself--he's no match for the indelible Ivan--so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real. Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

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Starred review from August 1, 2024
Brothers Peter and Ivan have just lost their father, the more devoted of their divorced parents. Ivan, 22, still in braces, meets the much-older Margaret at a chess event in which he was invited to play against all the members of a community chess club simultaneously, and won every game. Ivan is shy at first, and Margaret is nearly disgusted with herself for her attraction to him, but there's no denying their instant connection. A decade Ivan's senior, Peter, a self-medicating, bleeding-heart sort of Dublin lawyer, chides Ivan for falling for a woman who couldn't possibly be serious about him, thoughtlessly omitting from the discussion his own infatuation with Naomi, who's Ivan's age. This crisscross also brings in Sylvia, Peter's all-encompassing flame, practically a member of the family, who, following a terrible accident, can't fully be with him. Rooney's (Beautiful World, Where Are You, 2022) fourth novel might be her best yet: a tale of depth and grand sweep, an understated study of characters caught circling the margin of some great and unknown thing, and a diversion of pure enjoyment, too. Rooney's title tells us these brothers, in their love and fury for one another, are at an in-between moment, as she carefully, brilliantly writes them out of it.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Irish writer Rooney's U.S. following grows book by book, thanks, in part, to her earlier novels' TV adaptations.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 20, 2024

Best-selling Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You), who has had two novels adapted for TV, writes a story about love, family, and grief. Brothers Peter and Ivan have little in common, but both are dealing with the death of their father and managing relationships with the women in their lives. With a 500K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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