“Sometimes I just have a feeling. Like a sense of being loved by God, almost..
. Like when I’m with you.” I ntermezzo , the fourth book by Sally Rooney – the caustic kingpin of millennial fiction – has sailed with elegant inevitability to the top of the bestseller list.
Yet fans of Rooney’s poker-faced poised style may be surprised to realise that while her previous works flirted with faith, her new novel is unabashedly religious. While typically Rooneyish in silhouette – a cluster of nerdy, attractive Dubliners become emotionally and sexually enmeshed – Intermezzo is full of sincere (if, like, youthfully expressed) declarations of faith. Ivan, a chess pro whose braces can’t quite conceal his sexual magnetism, senses divine influence while playing (“It’s like the order is so deep.
.. there must be something underneath it all”), while his older girlfriend, Margaret, wonders if their relationship is a literally-God-sent chance to expiate the mistakes of a previous marriage.
Meanwhile, literature professor Sylvia, horribly (but invisibly) injured in a car accident, embodies a kind of Jesus/Virgin Mary mash-up, with her suffering, her celibacy, and her halo of “faintly golden” hair. Rooney has written about religion before: in her previous novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (a postlapsarian howl of a title, if ever I heard one), for instance, a character takes his Saturday night conquest along to Sunday mass. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the Catholi.