Sally Rooney's Intermezzo: Smut or sophisticated?
By RILEY STRAIT | October 22, 2024Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, the Sept. 24 addition to her oeuvre, is a novel chronicling the tumultuous relationship between the Dublin-based 22-year-old competitive chess player Ivan Koubek and his 32-year-old barrister brother Peter after the death of their father. Or, more suitably, Intermezzo is a novel chronicling the men’s relationship with women. What could have been a novel interrogating a variety of worthy themes — the function of grief and trauma in love, the explosive or inopportune nature of fate or the destructiveness of family — is instead a novel that reads like a pubescent teenage boy preoccupied with sex.
