A wish-fulfilment romance: Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney, reviewed

An earworm from the time of Covid: the sound of Connell and Marianne having breathless sex, bedsprings squeaking. I’m talking not about 2020’s hit TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling second novel, Normal People but about the relentless piss-take featured on BBC Radio 4’s Dead Ringers. After every few skits the show would cut to an audio clip of the two undergraduates going hard at it. The joke was in the repetition – an exaggeration of the extraordinary density of earnest sex scenes in Rooney’s writing. It was crude, cruel and very funny.

There is a wider than usual gulf between the writer Rooney wants to be and the writer she actually is

It’s all too easy to mock this serious- minded writer who dazzled the book world, aged just 26, with her single comic novel, Conversations with Friends (2017). Three novels later, that deliciously deadpan debut is starting to look like an outlier. Normal People (2018), Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) and now Intermezzo are sober explorations of anxious young people struggling through their twenties and thirties. Certain elements recur. Dublin is a key location, and at least some of the main characters are hyper-intelligent undergraduates or graduates of Trinity College. Rooney loves an even number and a bit of symmetry. Normal People focuses on a single couple, but all the rest take four main characters and complicate and contrast the various pairings. Often there is some kind of self-harm and an obscurely unpleasant family history. And there is always plenty of sex.

Strictly speaking, there are five main characters in Intermezzo, but it’s still a case of compare and contrast. Ivan and Peter Koubek are brothers – Ivan a chess genius in his early twenties, Peter a successful lawyer in his early thirties. Their father has just died after five years of cancer treatment.