Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo Feels Very Familiar

It would have been easy, a book or two ago, to blame it on age or circumstance: young writer, whiz kid, former debate champion, writes the same characters over and over, likely loosely based on her or her friends. I wouldn’t have cared for that, but it would have made sense, an excuse for why the novels kept more or less moving around the same sets of interpersonal dynamics without ever saying anything quite real about them. If that were true, it would have also followed that she’d grow out of it. Life happens to everyone, eventually, even writers with bestselling novels turned into Hulu/BBC shows. And then they, her characters, would have also grown out of it. But Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, is populated with people we’ve met before.

There’s the discontented man in his thirties engaged in bad behavior: Peter, a barrister with “ideals,” frustrated by and simultaneously covetous of his colleagues’ wealthy lifestyles, torn between his abiding affection for his longtime love Sylvia and his unbridled lust for his decade-younger hot-girl lover Naomi, all while mourning the death of his father. (This is also, more or less, Nick, an actor living in the shadow of his more-successful wife who embarks on an affair with the much younger Frances, in Conversations with Friends; and Simon, an advisor for a vaguely lefty government group in Beautiful World, Where Are You, torn between his desire for his longtime love interest Eileen and his devout Catholicism.)

There is a woman in her thirties whose tenuously settled adult life rests on some bargaining away of a fantasy: Margaret, a worker at a rural arts center who becomes paramour to Peter’s younger brother Ivan. (Conversations with Friends’s Melissa, who through gritted teeth accepts and even incorporates into her worldview her husband’s affair; Connell’s mother Lorraine in Normal People, more akin to a saint than a human; and aspiring-writer-turned-editor Eileen in…