The novel’s climax is not a dramatic confrontation but a chess game. The brothers, estranged for most of the book, finally sit across a board. Peter, who has not played in years, allows Ivan to win—or does he? The ambiguity is the point. In that silent exchange of pieces, Rooney stages a reconciliation that is not about forgiveness or resolution but about acknowledgment . Peter sees Ivan. Ivan sees Peter’s pain. They do not hug; they do not speak of their father. They play.
In contrast, the chapters focused on Ivan are more conventional in syntax but radical in emotional restraint. Ivan, who processes the world through the binary, rule-based logic of chess, speaks in clipped sentences and literal observations. His grief is not a flood but a vacuum. When he begins an improbable affair with Margaret, a woman eleven years his senior, Rooney writes his desire in stark, geometric terms: He likes the way she holds her cigarette. He likes the space between her front teeth. Where Peter’s narration is a fever dream, Ivan’s is a series of coordinates. This stylistic bifurcation is Rooney’s great technical achievement: she gives each brother a form that feels organically tied to his neurosis. The novel becomes a duet between chaos and order, the Romantic and the Classical, with grief as the common key signature.
What Sally Rooney achieves in Intermezzo is a maturation of her vision. She has moved from the ironic, clipped observations of millennial precarity to a more symphonic, riskier register. The novel suggests that the spaces between the major events of life—between fatherhood and sonhood, between one love and the next, between childhood and whatever comes after—are not empty. They are where we actually live. The intermezzo is not a waiting room; it is the whole performance. Intermezzo- Sally Rooney
The most immediate shock of Intermezzo is its prose. Rooney, once praised for her “masterly” minimalism, unleashes a torrential, unpunctuated interior monologue, primarily for Peter. Sentences spill across pages without periods, simulating the relentless, spiraling quality of anxious thought: he looks at her and the thought comes of how he will remember this moment later the way he is seeing it now and how the remembering will be the real thing even more than the seeing . This is not merely stylistic flourish; it is the novel’s primary engine of character. Peter, a lawyer trained to wield logic and language with precision, is internally incoherent. His grief for his father manifests as a somatic affliction—back pain, insomnia—and a compulsive, degrading relationship with his younger lover, Naomi. The unpunctuated prose captures his inability to close a thought, to reach a conclusion, to stop the recursive loop of self-hatred and longing.
Margaret, a librarian in her late thirties, is Ivan’s first lover. She is stable, intelligent, and trapped in a dying marriage out of duty. Her relationship with Ivan is improbable and, to many characters, scandalous. But Rooney refuses to sentimentalize or demonize it. Margaret sees Ivan’s social awkwardness not as a flaw but as a form of honesty she has been starved of. Their lovemaking is described with the same careful attention Rooney gives to a chess endgame: it is about patience, reading the other’s body as a board, making moves that are both strategic and vulnerable. Margaret represents the possibility of a love that is reparative —not fixing the other, but providing a space where one can be unfixed. The novel’s climax is not a dramatic confrontation
Rooney has always written desire as a form of class and power negotiation, but in Intermezzo , love is explicitly framed as an improvisation—an intermezzo within the larger, broken score of life. The two central female characters, Margaret and Naomi, are not merely love interests but structural mirrors.
Rooney resists the temptation of the redemptive ending. The final pages find the brothers in a state of fragile equilibrium. Peter is still addicted to painkillers and still entangled with both Sylvia and Naomi. Ivan is still socially odd and still in love with a woman whose husband will soon die. The grief is not gone. But it has been shared . The novel’s final image is of the two brothers walking together through a Dublin street, the rain stopping, the light changing. It is not a resolution but a coda —a brief, concluding passage that does not resolve the dissonance but allows it to fade, softly. The ambiguity is the point
Naomi is the more complex, dangerous figure. She is young, cynical, and uses her sexuality as a weapon and a shield. Her arrangement with Peter is degrading by any conventional measure, yet Rooney insists we see Naomi’s agency without romanticizing it. She is not a victim; she is a strategist surviving in a world that has offered her few other options. Her love for Peter is real, but it is expressed through power plays, transactional humor, and a refusal to be saved. If Margaret is a slow movement—andante cantabile—Naomi is a scherzo: frantic, ironic, prone to sudden dissonances. Together, these two relationships form the emotional counterpoint of the novel. Neither is “healthy” in a therapeutic sense, but both are true to the damaged people who inhabit them.