Christ-Haunted Sally Rooney

Intermezzo
by sally rooney
farrar, straus and giroux, 464 pages, $29

I grew up in Ireland in the 1970s and eighties. The parents of my friends, neighbors, cousins, classmates, and so on, mostly had intact marriages; only a tiny number were separated or divorced. Not all marriages were happy, but many were—or, at least, they were happy enough, and spouses were dutiful enough, to keep the show on the road. We lived in a world where home lives were, relatively speaking, stable, reliable, predictable, perhaps monotonous. And we imagined that Ireland, even as it changed and modernized, would carry on being like that, more or less.  

That was then, and this is now. The Ireland of today, as depicted in the novels of Sally Rooney, is close to a scorched earth when it comes to intact and happy marriages. Her main characters invariably come from families that have collapsed, are collapsing, or have never even formed. In Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), Alice (who, like Rooney, is a young, spectacularly successful Irish novelist) says of traditional marriage, “at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life. . . . What do we have now? Instead? Nothing.” However, traditional marriage is also “obviously not fit for purpose,” according to Alice. 

But if marriage is not fit for purpose, then what is? Rooney’s new and fourth novel Intermezzo introduces us to a cast of characters groping for an answer to this question, an answer that might unlock happiness for them in their own complex love lives. Two brothers, Peter and Ivan, are the children of marital breakdown. Peter is a lawyer in his thirties; the younger Ivan is a gifted chess player. The beginning of the novel finds them grieving the death of their father. Their mother is still alive but has long since departed to a new marriage.

Naomi, Peter’s girlfriend and a student, is also from a broken home: “Father not in the picture and the mother’s a headcase, drinker, in and out of rehab. Only forty-four. [Peter’s] heard them on the phone together: Naomi the grown-up, her mother the child.” Peter is torn between Naomi, with whom he has a sexually satisfying but otherwise perpetually half-formed relationship, and his old girlfriend, Sylvia, a professor of English literature. He and Sylvia were a golden couple at university but broke up after a car accident that has left her in chronic, lifelong pain. Peter is at war with his brother, as their grief and coping mechanisms slowly tear them apart. He is sick of his job and increasingly prey to thoughts of suicide.

Ivan, an awkward young man seeking to insert himself more fully into life just as his brother is wondering how he might exit it altogether, begins an intense relationship with Margaret, a woman much older than him. She is separated from her husband, an alcoholic. 

W. B. Yeats’s famous line bears the truth about marriage in Rooneyan Ireland: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Question marks cluster and swirl over the value and viability of monogamy. The childless, ostensibly free characters act on their desires, but it is still not without cost: pleasure and havoc, fulfillment and regret, are there in almost equal measure. The conflicts and dilemmas the characters stumble into, their inner turmoil and outer maneuvers, are described with heart-rending acuity. But Rooney is a tentative optimist. Her novels often conclude with the main characters on the verge of squeezing through a crack in the walls that have been closing in on them, glimpsing some form of happiness and fulfillment beyond.

Sex and desire are constants in Sally Rooney’s work. (Intermezzo feels too long, at times, because of its many detailed sex scenes, something Rooney is known for. Four books later, however, they are adding very little, apart from pages.) But where there’s sex, there’s religion. In Beautiful World, Where Are You, three of the four main characters end the novel either as practicing Catholics or something loosely adjacent. In Intermezzo, the figure of Christ is invoked twice in the first chapter. Peter leads the residual agonized prayer life of the lapsed child. (It may be one of the things that keeps him alive long enough to see a way through.) Ivan and Margaret discuss faith, God, and prayer at length. 

Rooney doesn’t dismiss the relevance and potency of religion. While her characters may no longer be the direct inheritors of the deposit of faith, they at least remain the inheritors of the questions of faith—questions that Catholic theology and doctrine exist to answer.  

The other great constant in Sally Rooney’s novels is, of course, Dublin, a city of churches. In Conversations with Friends (2017), Frances, in pain from endometriosis and close to fainting, has something akin to a religious experience in the Church of St. Augustine and St. John on Thomas Street. In Beautiful World, Eileen goes to Mass in the Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners, on the Lower Rathmines Road, and is flabbergasted. (“Is it really possible I witnessed such a scene, right in the middle of Dublin, only a few hours ago?”) At the conclusion of Intermezzo, Rooney maneuvers the warring brothers Peter and Ivan to a spot outside the gates of St. Mary’s Pro Cathedral on Marlborough Street, where they reconcile with one another and discuss whether they believe in God. Both confess to trying, to doing their best. 

In typical Rooneyan fashion, the novel ends with the characters turning a corner, unsure about what exactly they will find. Questions surrounding Peter and Ivan’s romantic relationships are left unresolved. Yet answers beckon from the margins—some of them, perhaps, from the other side of the cathedral gates. Peripheral but sympathetic and contented characters in Intermezzo and Conversations with Friends are married with children. At the end of Beautiful World, Eileen is pregnant and exultant and going to Mass. Are the old ways, discarded and left for dead, rising back on their feet? Sally Rooney does not trade in clear, direct answers on these matters, but neither does she run away from the questions. I expect her future novels will contain more theology, more families, and more turning to Christ.

John Duggan writes from Surrey, ­England.

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Image by Giuseppe Milio, provided by Flickr, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.