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, like the Dublin author’s previous novels, Intermezzo is a love story: a very straight, very white, very middle-class, wholly interior and unproductively hyped love story. There’s plenty I could say about all of that. It has been said before.
Credit: What’s new? Rooney’s confidence. Her last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), was as much a manifesto as a novel – an author reclaiming her literary identity after a pop-cultural hijacking. It was a bruised and reactive book, as most rejoinders are.
Intermezzo is a chess game and Rooney is in control of both sides of the board. The rhythms of gameplay are built into the architecture of the novel: from its three acts (opening gambit, middlegame, endgame), to its interpersonal moves and countermoves. Rooney also copies the masters here – Keats, Sontag, Lana Del Rey – folding their words into her own (like John Hughes, but with citations).
That’s what chess players do: imitate. Weaponise memory. In chess terms, an “intermezzo” is a moment of rupture, a move that brings an unexpected threat.
That is where Rooney begins. Two Irish brothers – Ivan and Peter Koubek – have just buried their father. They will be our opposing players; grief their intermezzo.
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