Ah, Men

The boys of Sally Rooney's fiction

Image: Lucian Freud, “Double Portrait.”

This is a special cross-post between writer Grace Byron and Language Arts, a newsletter by Sophia and Layla on the buzzy releases you want to read about. Today, Byron takes on the new Sally Rooney.

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Ah, men. The stuff of life. “Men, as everyone knows, disgusting,” Sally Rooney writes. Some men, she writes, think of themselves as the king chess piece and some don’t. But “the king is weak and cowardly, and spends most of the game hiding in the corner.” This is the crux of her new novel, Intermezzo, a chess match between two brothers. One learns action and the other learns acceptance. The problem is to decipher who’s who in this parable of manners.

A delightfully European novel with two mirroring love stories at its core, a novel in the classic sense. Like George Eliot or Austen—or so I imagine if I could ever finish one of their novels—like Anna Karenina, Howards End, and Jane Eyre. This time Rooney backs away from the male-female dichotomy she established in her previous work to focus on two good old boys who struggle to ask women what they are feeling instead of mucking it all up with their silly assumptions. Yes, silence is still a key Rooney plot point.

Ivan is a chess player and Peter is a lawyer. Two respectable enough gentlemen living in Ireland. These are not the weepy wan men of Normal People or Conversations with Friends. They are more like the boys in Beautiful World, Where Are You? Still lost, of course, but searching for an alternate masculinity to the one they were presented with. Both men are grieving the death of their father. Neither of them wants to get into it. They would rather leave it be for another time. But their misdirected sorrow and anger corrode their relationships. Ivan struggles to ask for what he wants. Peter takes Xanax and gets drunk, failing to disclose key details to one or another woman in his life. He can’t seem to imagine a world where he can both have and want. He worries everyone sees him as cringe when he’s with his much younger lover Naomi and worries that his ex-wife Sylvia can never be enough since she can’t have sex with him after her accident. (We never learn the exact details.)

Ivan is a bit autistic, though, his brother says, “I guess you can’t say that now.” Ivan’s close third-person narration is spare. Intuitive with clear nouns and verbs. He struggles to extricate a person’s external life from their interior, even though he knows his own inner life is vastly different from how people perceive him. Ivan allows Rooney to explore a softer masculinity, one where a younger man is working to seduce Margaret, an older divorced woman just trying to get by. She’s focused on small-town respectability and disconnected from her body intuition. Most Rooney women are. Ivan stammers and asks for kisses all the same. His rizz (or lack of it depending on your ick factor) comes from a gentle persistence and direct desire. Margaret is the woman for him. She teaches him how to be a man, how to hold her, and even when she doesn’t directly instruct him, he learns something about being with a woman.

Peter’s chapters are choppy. Stream-of-consciousness. Full of interjections. “I’m sorry. I love you. Her. Both. Don’t worry. Don’t say it. Christ no.” Even more so than the usual Rooney novel, it’s quite Irish. Don’t worry—it’s not Beckettian, not nearly as opaque. But it does recall the helter-skelter narration of Anna Burns’ excellent Milkman instead of the easy reading of a Tana French mystery. (Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting expertly capitalizes on both such styles.) Peter is self-sacrificing to a fault, just can’t choose between the two women in his life. “He really likes women,” Ivan says. One younger and luxuriously sexual and one older but can’t match his erotic nature anymore after an accident that led to their divorce. “Christ also survived his own death.” A lack of choice, a lack of agency, even when he has all the resources in the world. He is haunted by the “graveyard of youth,” taking care of his younger “oddball” brother and his father after their mother left them to fend on their own.

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Frustrated desire and confusing sex is a Rooney mantra and Intermezzo is no different. Woman’s “soft passivity” and the “animal stupidity of desire.” The embodiment of such freedom is Naomi, a young woman who is sex worker and sings Lana Del Rey in the shower. Not a deep cut, but an early song, “Video Games.” There’s a tendency to riff on the pop star’s lyrics as a meta-text that can stand in for women’s feelings about violence. She is a meme. The woman who rolls into Coachella on a motorcycle cooing: “Tell me do you like the bad girls, honey is that true, it’s better than I ever even knew.”

This is the kind of woman Naomi is. She doesn’t shave her legs. Another trait that Rooney seems to make more of than I do. She sends emojis, uses the term “dilf,” and doesn’t ask her rich boyfriend Peter too many questions. A cool girl who is always on the verge of losing her housing.

Margaret is equally an untamed woman in her own way. She’s older so she has the edge of experience. She is often described as “wet.” While Peter and Naomi have sex, it is Margaret that Rooney uses to give language and texture to sexual desire. Unlike Lana Del Rey or Naomi, Margaret is reticent to express desire even as her body becomes a malleable metaphor in Rooney’s prose. It’s not the sex, which is apparently mind-bendingly good, that gives her pause, it’s the fact that her lover, Ivan, is a fair bit younger than her.

Ivan only occasionally gives voice to his physical stirrings and usually only as confirmation or negation about his expectations of sex: “Is this how it feels, he thinks, to get what you want? To desire, and at the same time to have, still desiring, but fulfilled.”

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Once again, Christ makes an appearance in Rooney’s world. Marx too, though in a much more minor role. The great thinkers pop up as decoration and vague thematic clues rather than actual plot points. In his Irish stream-of-consciousness, Peter thinks “Christ commands us universally to love one another.” In an apologetically Christian way, he is dealing with the erosion of narrative. The older brother even googles the age Jesus was when he died. He “[h]ad believed once that life must lead to something, all unresolved conflicts, and questions leading on towards some great culmination… Irrational attachment to meaning.” Yet even with housing security and a grown-up job, he can’t make sense of his life. Choice ruins him. Ivan too finds choice a stumbling block. Grief unfurls meaning, destroys linear thinking. “Why does one thing to have follow meaningfully from another?” Ivan wonders. Indeed, Rooney doesn’t give us a Marxist or Christian novel. Instead she wonders about how redemption happens between smaller units such as the family.

Rooney continually name-drops systems of thinking without giving them context or deeper implications. Ivan was once an incel but starts to develop a feminist consciousness after dating Margaret and encountering pregnant women on the bus. He ponders the weakness of women who desire men. It is the love of women that forces these men to contend with the oppression of women. This is a curious point, the possibility of love transforming our politics, though Rooney never fully fleshes this out. Family abolition is still too taboo for the best-seller aisle unless merely name-dropped as a fringe ideology.

She dangles multiple ideological threads in her novels without delivering—religion, class, gender. But maybe this is the point of a novel, to gloss over politics without turning into a diatribe. (Tolstoy would disagree, but he is dead so perhaps that doesn’t matter much to contemporary readers looking for a hit of inspiration from the new Sally Rooney.) For instance, this thread: “A mother is not an endless thing. She has done what she could.” This could easily turn into a case of family abolition or even D. W. Winnicott’s theory about good-enough mothering, but instead, it stands alone. What, Rooney continues to ask, is the role of fiction in a world intent on political cannibalism? What answers can it provide? Not unlike Woolf, she hints at the vicious textures occurring behind her on the world stage. Climate change, war, drone bombs, racism. She is rarely topical. At first, this can seem grating, but eventually, it can feel refreshing. “A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground/With no one around to tweet it,” Taylor Swift famously sang on Evermore. In Rooney’s work technology is neither a stumbling block nor a prop, just another way characters fail to “only connect.”

The detente Rooney forces her characters into is not a feminist problem or a class problem so much as a phenomenological issue. No one can name their feelings. It’s too scary. At the end of Normal People or Conversations with Friends or even Intermezzo, it is the ability to name feelings that either severs or cements kinship. Marianne and Conell must overcome their awkward shy feelings about class. Alice Kelleher must confront her money and guilt. Frances must disclose an affair and her true heterosexual stirrings. Ivan and Peter must confront their tangled web of grief and anger to overcome their masculine animosity.

Women all too often serve as the conduit for this naming procedure even as they choose self-harm over expressing their hopes, fears, and desires. “The erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,” Rooney told the Guardian. Peter’s ex-wife Sylvia is often this channel in Intermezzo, helping the two brothers reconnect and communicate across the nihilistic canyon of their differences. There’s something eerily prescient about this approach in an age that once again glorifies heroin chic and polices women’s bodies and speech instead of allowing them to express their thoughts, emotions, and politics freely.

As bodily autonomy is stripped away, why not focus instead, over here, on how to talk to your boyfriend or monitor your caloric intake? Don’t worry about abortion rights, hormones, or anything like that. The performative utterance is moot. No need to even try to enact freedom through language, men are here to swallow you whole. In Rooney’s novels, the performative utterance is often limited to navigating heterosexual unions. Men usually have the final say anyway. Heterosexuality is a comedy of manners. Of saying the right thing at the right time to not upset the fragile ego of man. Yet—this is precisely the point Rooney makes so well, the delicate balancing act required of gendered relations. It’s fascinating—and I would argue rewarding—to watch her approach it from a different angle this time in Intermezzo.

Maybe because Rooney dangles the possibility of addressing larger political and moral questions, it is disappointing she does not ask why the world condemns women to silence. While Naomi is a sex worker struggling with housing insecurity, Rooney never explores how she feels about her place in the world next to someone as rich as her boyfriend Peter. We only get glimpses at the larger political machinations that force these characters into their classed, raced, and gendered places.

One glimpse into such political weather is a case Peter takes on. A gender discrimination suit about women’s uniforms. Adding more of this texture would make the world Rooney builds seem less removed. If Ivan really was a right-wing incel, how did he climb out of such a deep hole?

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Ivan is our Levin, an honest man trying to navigate the small country he has grown up in. He wants a simple life with his dog and Margaret and chess. Peter is our Vronsky. Our warning sign. The brutal sacrificial lamb and self-saboteur. There is no need to make life harder than it is. Like her last novel, Rooney delivers a happy ending. “Yes, the world makes room for goodness and decency,” Ivan thinks. (“Decent” is a word that often recurs in Intermezzo.)

Rooney too has been “woman’d,” as Rayne Fisher-Quann once put it. After rising to stardom with two break-out Hulu Original Series and glamorous pre-sale merch, a classic Andrea Long Chu review was never far behind.

Rooney’s star has eclipsed her body of work. Yet she sticks to the path. She never meant to be a politician or even a debater—just a novelist. And for the record, she’s a good one.

As a starlet, she is still regularly forced to account for social issues in the media. Patriarchy, politics, class, and love come up one by one as she fields questions about what it means to be the voice of her generation. But love shines through. Love of reading, of partnership, and of solidarity in the face of nihilism. Companionship allows for authors to risk asking bigger questions, both within and without their work. Just like Vladimir Nabokov had Vera liking his stamps and opening his umbrellas, so too Rooney has backup (as she says in her recent Guardian profile):

[Rooney] credits her husband, John, with making her writing possible, and not just by bringing her cups of tea and emptying the bins. “Having had this experience of falling in love when I was very young, with somebody who completely transformed my life, and transforms it every day, has allowed me to write stories about people whose lives are transformed by love,” she says. “Without that, I don’t think my work would be recognisable. Just his presence in my life made it possible for me to write everything that I’ve written.”

“Conduct is more important than beliefs,” the younger brother in Intermezzo tells us. This is a striking point and one worth examining in the case of Rooney herself. While her novels are not overtly political, she has taken strong stands in the real world. She has written op-eds in support of Palestine and turned down offers for her work to be translated into Hebrew by Israeli publishers. This is a stark (and all too rare) position in the literary arts, one worth emulating. And, indeed, novels are not meant to give us easy morals, any instruction they give is purely incidental. They parse through life itself: its strands, its particulars, its frenetic rhythms. Such affective readings allow for a multiplicity of readings, opening up both the affective and political.

Ultimately, Rooney’s men do change both their conduct and their beliefs. Polyamory and unionized girlfriends are involved, something the traditional novel would never take on. Novels are traditionally meant to be about marriage, all narrative seeks resolution. Rooney’s last work did just that. In Intermezzo, Rooney takes a different if not still highly optimistic approach. Even so, reading her is always pleasurable. Her work offers genuine insight and joy and thinking through her novels is deeply enjoyable. She constructs curious puzzles even as she wraps things up rather neatly.

Can the novel continue if its primary aim is to consummate love behind closed doors? Can novels end without a marriage plot? Of course, the door remains open. A prince who pays the bills or at least delivers a consistent orgasm would be nice. From Austen to Bridgerton to Outlander to Colleen Hoover, love is profitable. Yet Rooney is still a believer for the skeptics, she rewards us with a double marriage in Beautiful World and two couplings in Intermezzo.

After all, Rooney has described herself as an optimist. The ending of Intermezzo has a few too many apologies and small redemptive acts that seek to transcend the viciousness that came before. Irrational, quiet, and imperfect. It’s a bit trite, but isn’t grace always?