Sally Rooney’s new book is out in a few days. So, is it any good?

FICTION Intermezzo Sally Rooney Faber & Faber, $32.99 Like the boxing ring and the poker table, the chessboard is a rich terrain for storytellers. It’s an existential battleground, an allegorical playscape.

In The Luzhin Defence (1964), Vladimir Nabokov used chess as a metaphor for obsessive madness. In The Queen’s Gambit (1979), Walter Tevis wrote the counterargument: chess mastery as self-mastery. In Stefan Zweig’s novella, The Royal Game (1942), chess was an analogy for the spread of Nazism.

Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo is a chess game, but she is in control of both sides of the board. Credit: New York Times But when Lewis Carroll sent Alice back into Wonderland in Through the Looking Glass (1879), the game she played was childhood. Umberto Eco thought of chess as a potent analogy for reading ( The Role of the Reader , 1979).

And Raymond Chandler didn’t think much of it all: “as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency” ( The Big Sleep , 1939). Now it’s Sally Rooney’s turn at the board with her fourth novel, Intermezzo : a tale of sibling discord, sexual politics, and the wisdom of pawns and kings. “Every moment of life is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played,” she writes, “if only you know how to live.

” That’s Rooney’s perennial question: What does it mean to live well? It’s a sincere question and Rooney has a sincere answer: connection (E.M. Forster would approve).

And so, lik.