Dublin. Gray and rainy. Streets and buildings whose names have the “sound of familiarity”, meaning that there’s an author’s expectation that I will know the names, but I don’t since I don’t know Dublin.
Two brothers at a service for the dead, their father. Older brother Peter gives the eulogy. It turns out that this is resented by younger brother Ivan, who’s convinced he knew father better and was closer to him. This is probably right, but Ivan wasn’t asked. “The older brother gives the eulogy.” A trite explanation. But Peter has the “presence” and the status. A successful Dublin lawyer in politically correct human rights causes. Articulate, dominating, used to getting his own way. With all the influential friends in the city. Peter, who can make even cabinet ministers squirm. Who gets regular mention in the papers for his successful cases. Handsome. Socially adept. And with two lovers of a kind (relationships are complicated in Intermezzo), one with a woman ten years his junior, Naomi, who earns spare cash by posting pornographic pictures of herself and who is supported by cash infusions by Peter who can afford to subsidize her. And Peter loves her. But what that means in this context is one of the complicated questions you ask yourself in this story. Peter plays the big man with Naomi. He’s ten years more mature; he’s a domineering lawyer, and he has the dough.
Peter’s other “flame” is a former flame. Sylvia. S is his own age, an academic…she’s a prof. They no longer sleep together. She can’t, being a sufferer of chronic pain from an old accident. She subsists on pain relief prescriptions whose content is never specified. It was Sylvia who ended the relationship with Peter. But it was Peter who agreed to it.
Peter still has a key to her apartment. He still lies in bed with her to comfort her when the pain gets bad. One day, he uses his key to access her home and finds her lying on the carpet; the pain is so bad she can’t get up. Syvia is a brilliant academic. Intellectual equals: they love to exchange ideas. A Platonic relationship…except he has a key and shares her bed for her comfort’s sake and for his own. Complicated. You should love that about Intermezzo.
Enough about Peter: Ivan is the more central brother, at least in this reader’s opinion. As socially inept as his brother is sleek. Ivan coming into his own is part of the romance of this novel. At first, he seems like the ugly duckling of the family…even the freak. But as he comes into himself, Rooney subtly shifts our perception of Ivan. It turns out that Ivan may be just as formidable as his brother in his own manner as he comes into his own. Ivan’s was a chess prodigy, but as he has grown older, and as a result, one senses, of his socially sterile existence, his chess vision falters and he has failed to make grandmaster status, a ranking that some of his lesser talented friends have already achieved.
And then with a surprising flair that can only be called hidden genius or just dumb luck, Ivan finds a lover and discovers himself. Magaret, an arts director he meets at a chess demonstration, happens to be at least ten years older. So while Peter is robbing the cradle with Naomi, while still loving the more age-appropriate Sylvia, Ivan with Margaret, is in a tender affair of superlative intimacy with an older, albeit still married woman, Margaret, who is separated from her husband, Ricky, who’s a truly disgraceful, unrepentant drunk.
That’s enough of a basic exposition of what you get in Intermezzo. I’ve tried to indicate the brilliant complexity of this tale. The book arches like a grand bridge by means of parallel plotting. The brothers feud: Peter patronizes his waifish brother, Ivan. Ivan loathes Peter for it.
The great arch of parallel plotting only comes together at the end when the parallel plots, after many diversions with many subsidiary characters, all stimulating, finally collide.
*****
Wanted to add this: I realized early in my reading of Intermezzo, I’m not sure how, that I wasn’t dealing with a story with a secular world view. It’s as if the very air of Dublin, like a fog, is saturated with religion. I found this remarkable. There’s a speculation in the story about an “aesthetic” conception of God (a phrase from the book), that perhaps attempts to fit into “the post-Catholic era” (again, phrasing from the book). This brought me up short. Having never participated in a “Catholic era” myself, I was astonished to find myself in a “post-Catholic” one.
There’s a touch, at least, of irony here. Paraphrasing the novel: Perhaps everything pertaining to God is beautiful and everything pertaining to man is ugly. This seems to me to be a svelte restatement of the doctrine of original sin. So the post-Catholic era seems to be Catholic. Perhaps that’s not far from the author’s intent.
Ivan and Peter and their respective lovers, all try so hard to be good. They worry so much about their failures to do the right thing while wondering what the right thing is…within the context of Rooney’s eloquent prose, dense with sensuality, with noticing things, flowing like a beautiful Joycean current.
