Intermezzo (2024). Image: Canva.
When Australian critic Shannon Burns was a teenager in the 90s, he worked as a sorter at an Adelaide recycling centre. As per his memoir Childhood, it begins as a weekend job, but he ends up working there full-time for the rest of his adolescence. At school, he’s introduced to Shakespeare, which opens up something ‘as though he has been woken from a long, dreary dream’, and later Keats and Wordsworth, ‘compelled by a force he doesn’t understand […] trying to grasp the meanings and commit some of the phrasing to memory’.
This leads to poetry by Allen Ginsberg, then D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When he must find his own place to live at seventeen, he—because he can’t afford electricity at first—reads by the light of the streetlamp next to the window. He borrows The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace from the library, even as ‘his eyes follow sentences he can’t digest’. Through these acts of reading he derives a certain pleasure—one of ‘not being at work, the brief freedom to do nothing’. A particular loneliness is quelled through books.
So it is too for Connell in Sally Rooney’s bestseller Normal People, who struggles to adjust to university social life at the prestigious Trinity College as a ‘culchie’ (a colloquial pejorative term used in Ireland in the vein of ‘hick’ or ‘townie’). Friendless, he spends his idle time reading whatever he can lay his hands on. When he’s interrupted one night while in the thick of Emma as the library is closing, he ‘walk[s] home in a state of strange emotional agitation […] amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that’. But, he concludes, ‘literature moves him’, and ‘that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them’.
Here I’m reminded of French writer Didier Eribon, who in his memoir Returning to Reims observes that fiction provides as many insights into the range of individual and collective experiences in the world as sociology or other theoretical texts. Eribon had spent much of his life trying to understand his position as someone in between classes, growing up working class and then gaining upward mobility through literacy and the arts. For those like him, this is a familiar friction, a process which philosopher Chantal Jaquet defines as ‘transclass’. In her illuminative treatise Transclasses, she notes a distinct ‘social non-reproduction’ that occurs with those who ‘move from one [lower] class to another [higher class]’. Social mobility, after all, was invented by the bourgeoisie; what’s unmistakably singular about such a transition is that, unlike socioeconomic descent, you can’t quite go back, you don’t really unlearn. It’s a mystery inexorably informed by capital, and which cannot be solved within capitalism.
Unlike socioeconomic descent, you can’t quite go back, you don’t really unlearn.
Many of Rooney’s characters inhabit this specific, slippery social position—they derive cultural capital from their proximity to wealth, either through university education, being an artist, befriending artists, dating rich, or all of the above, even if they’re made perplexed by upper-class interests and social mores. Whether that’s Connell, who finds himself at a loss at Trinity when he enters the well-heeled social circle of his high school on-again-off-again lover Marianne, or Frances in Rooney’s debut Conversation with Friends, who compares herself against her old-money close friend Bobbi and later gets involved with the rich married actor Nick, underlying class tensions are a feature in Rooney’s fiction. Characters move through fraught terrain in which the habits and pleasures of the financially privileged remain alienating at the same time they themselves are viewed as anomalous. Power imbalances and affective comparisons are often how working-class people first attain class consciousness: barometers that measure fairness in the world, observations that can induce a vested interest in (social) justice. Speak to one of us and we’ll tell you as much. A self-proclaimed Marxist and one who had herself undergone the transclass process, Rooney is alive to this friction.
Yet, the proletarianisation of knowledge work in the twenty-first century, unfolding at the same time even as it retains the old perception of it being exclusive and revered via a winner-takes-all system, presents newer challenges. ‘On the one hand, all workers have some basic political goals in common, and recognising those commonalities could help to build class solidarity,’ Rooney said post-Normal People’s success. ‘On the other hand,’ she continued, ‘relatively wealthy and privileged workers, say software developers at major tech companies, have very different lives from more obviously underpaid and exploited workers. Does it make sense to say both kinds of workers belong to the same “class”? I don’t know.’
She attempts to reach for an answer in Beautiful World, Where Are You. Outside of the class tensions between microfamous novelist Alice and her warehouse labourer boyfriend Felix, we encounter frequent emails with her best friend Eileen, a low-paid editor at a literary magazine. Both women question—often with an air of disillusionment—whether fulfilment is at all possible in a world marked by inequality and climate imperialism. This may come across as liberal hand-wringing (and it is), but when ordinary desire is portrayed in this way—not an inherent trait but influenced and shaped by the economic and social structures we live in—it presents more routes towards unlearning those structures beyond simply experiencing its accompanying inertias.
A self-proclaimed Marxist and one who had herself undergone the transclass process, Rooney is alive to this friction.
In Rooney’s much-anticipated fourth novel, this hypothesis rears its head once again. A surprising departure from her previous work, Intermezzo opens with the rapid-fire voice of Peter Koubek, a Xanax-addicted thirty-two-year-old human rights lawyer and university professor whose life is in disarray following his father’s death. He’s unravelling behind a stoic public façade and professional success, almost manic yet listless. In the background, Peter still harbours feelings for his first love Sylvia, a fellow thirty-something academic he remains close friends with, while at the same time dating Naomi, a broke twenty-three-year-old college student he financially provides for.
Meanwhile, his twenty-two-year-old brother Ivan, equally gripped with grief, flounders through life barely making rent, having to chase up invoices from freelance tutoring. It’s suggested early in the book that he’s autistic; his special interest is competitive chess. At a tournament in rural Leitrim, he meets thirty-six-year-old Margaret, who manages the program at the arts centre where the competition is held, and we’re brought into their burgeoning romance and its redemptive possibilities. After much interpersonal drama and internal conflict, the five cross paths.
In Intermezzo, Rooney again concerns herself with the conflict between conscious and unconscious desire, albeit slantwise and from a more adroit perspective. Why do we want the things we do, even if we tell ourselves otherwise? If we live in a capitalist society, are surrounded by capital, are conditioned by the logics of capital, then what might desire look like outside of these confines? As Lauren Berlant puts it in their short volume Desire/Love, ‘This is a psychological question about the reliability of emotional knowledge, but it is also a political question about the ways norms produce attachments to certain fantasies.’
Though Rooney’s characters all differ in disposition, what they have in common is an omnipresent interrogation of normality within desire. In an email to Eileen in Beautiful World, Alice writes of those who intentionally court fame: ‘The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease.’ When Connell goes out with someone else in an attempt to get over Marianne, he convinces himself that the loveless relationship is ‘normal. A good relationship’. Frances privately persuades herself of her normality but simultaneously thinks herself an exception: ‘Things matter more to me than normal people’.
Though Rooney’s characters all differ in disposition, what they have in common is an omnipresent interrogation of normality within desire.
In Intermezzo, Ivan similarly regards ordinariness as enviable and something he resents, one example being the smooth nonchalance he perceives in his brother, who when brought the wrong food in a restaurant will automatically correct a waiter, who ‘doesn’t hesitate before saying it […] just says it right out, completely normal’. Later, Peter brings up Ivan’s presumed abnormality to Sylvia, who’s sceptical and lobs the question back about herself. ‘What, normal? Of course you are. I mean in terms of social skills, emotional intelligence,’ Peter replies. When Peter finds out about Ivan’s relationship with Margaret, he scoffs: ‘Do you think a normal woman of her age would want to hang out with someone in your situation?’ And so on.
The drama here is between two brothers who grapple with mutual antipathy arising from the projection of their own shortcomings, magnified after their father dies. Peter and Ivan appear very different on the surface, yet each struggles with similar feelings of inadequacy and estrangement, particularly in how their desires align—or fail to align—with the realities of the world they live in. More literally, their affections mirror one another as well: Peter in a non-monogamous sexual relationship with a much younger woman in a sugar-baby arrangement; Ivan seeing a much older woman who’s newly separated.
These emotions appear to the brothers as shameful and taboo, resulting in a disjuncture between what they understand and what they feel. Peter is constantly plagued with doubt, if having feelings for two women seems ‘so wrong to be morally illegible’, while Ivan wonders about ‘the confusing events in his life that seem to involve […] the wrongs he has done to others, or the wrongs done by others to him’. Margaret wonders if she is wrong to be vain, whether anyone other than herself becomes a ‘victim of her wrongness’; Sylvia rues the consequences of her chronic illness, whether her inability to have sex makes her a defective woman.
Having purged her frustrations—albeit didactically—surrounding the celebrity-industrial complex in Beautiful World, Rooney appears to be now directing her attention towards her critics, who described her work as ‘politically complacent’ and ‘plotted but not too plotted, stylish but not too stylish, political but not too political, modern but not too modern’, among others glazed with a similar dismissiveness. Rooney has also been derided as writing ‘sanctimony literature’, but I’d argue these are misreadings of her work. It’s not so much her characters’ hand-wringing we should take so literally, more that we do live in a society where our wants and behaviours are almost never ‘pure’, such as in the pursuit of orthodoxy. One critique that’s less of a kneejerk is how she’s ‘eager to sucker-punch her critics by clarifying her viewpoints beyond all doubt’.
Rooney appears to be now directing her attention towards her critics.
Indeed, the fact that the novel’s author is still living may very well be the problem. Just as it is with Beautiful World, where Rooney turns to autofiction to express her annoyance with the relentless parasocialisms that celebrity manufactures, she provides at the end of Intermezzo a three-page appendix that acts as the novel’s skeleton—a total fucking checkmate, if you will. It’s reminiscent of the closing lines from the essay that would propel her to this position now, pre-Conversations: ‘Like Fast Eddie, I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best.’
In chess, an intermezzo is a surprise, a bold move that insists on an immediate response, which only then is followed up by what was expected. Intermezzo’s shift from Rooney’s earlier, more naive novels, conveys this ambition to unsettle the status quo but also proves that this has been within sight all along through her deadpan, open style. In the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘numbers game’, sequences of numbers represent patterns that people interpret based on their understanding of the rules, which means that different people might see different patterns or rules in the same sequence. Basically, there are many ways into a book. In Beautiful World, Rooney experimented with Socratic email exchanges between women as alternate epistolary chapters; in Intermezzo, she attempts something else, foregrounding male perspectives and exploring varied relationships—familial, platonic, transactional, etc—that create further configurations of similar questions surrounding capital and desire. If Rooney’s previous work were exercises in interrogating the transclass process, then Intermezzo wants to ask what happens after one is comfortably ensconced in this process—if they are living ‘the right life’, as is one of Peter’s mental imperatives even if it’s more a mantra than something he explicitly acts upon. What is this ‘right life’? Is there even one?
Halfway through Intermezzo, Peter’s origins are revealed as he recalls his school friends asking ‘why does [his Slovak migrant] father talk like that,’ noting that ‘what they were born to, he has to work for. Taste, manners, culture’. He may now be living a well-off existence within the professorial-managerial class, but the problem persists through the incongruity he experiences between the public and the private. He is, as Jaquet identifies, ‘condemned to the great gap between often incompatible universes […] necessarily torn by open or subterranean contradictions’.
Later, Sylvia and Ivan take a walk in the park and discuss ‘vacuous truth’, a logical concept which, put simply, is a truth that’s only true on the surface. An example promise: ‘If I ever own a unicorn, I will give you a ride’—sounds true, except unicorns don’t exist. Desire under capital is a vacuous truth. This is to say that social games are not unlike language games, which depend on power dynamics to function.
Her work contains a hope, one that wishes to cast a mirror on the traps that capitalism sets before us.
Could acknowledging this predicament be one way to write a contemporary Marxist novel? An update of, say, E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End—in that it’s widely available, interrogates social identity through dramatic relations, direct yet coated in allegory? The only problem would be that her characters are white and largely heterosexual, but she’s simply writing what she knows, considering she grew up in rural Ireland and continues to live there. While Rooney’s work doesn’t directly advocate Marxism, it reflects a notion articulated by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, that revolution can begin through an objective understanding of oneself.
Like Mansfield Park, Ulysses, Jane Eyre, et al, Intermezzo is metafiction. By using the modernist, bourgeois novel form to stage postmodern problems, Rooney extends us a gift à la Mrs Dalloway, à la Pride and Prejudice, but inverts classical Euro-American social realism and places their preoccupations within the now, where capitalism has acquired the unassailable mantle of ‘realism’, where we’re so far gone that the only way to subvert it is to weaponise its truisms, one tangible example being the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that Rooney personally supports and speaks about publicly through her platform as a prominent author.
In this reality, her work contains a hope, one that wishes to cast a mirror on the traps that capitalism sets before us in the world. What animates Rooney’s work is her curiosity around this dilemma: what it might mean to want more within capitalist infrastructures—especially what ends up governing our private lives—in the hopes of exiting them collectively.
Like the mass-produced classics many of us encounter when we’re first introduced to books that widen our understanding of the world, leading us to seek out more knowledge, a language game is being played. And during a time where class distinctions are made less straightforward as capitalism accelerates, social realism may no longer be adequate. Rooney is writing capitalist realist fiction, and Intermezzo is her best attempt yet. The marketing, the fame—those are distractions. The question remains: if it’s impossible to be content under capitalism’s structures, then what else could be possible?
