Maddie Butchko

“Intermezzo,” Sally Rooney’s newest novel, explores love and loneliness. Prying open the minds of her characters, Rooney inspects the barriers of grief, pride and fear that drive us apart despite our intrinsic desire for connection. A belief that we are “different” in some fundamental way causes us to withdraw, to pull back before the judgment of others can hurt us. Our own thoughts isolate us. As one protagonist puts it, “the human mind … is often repetitive, often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts.” But “Intermezzo” has a hopeful thesis: that love, in its unconditional acceptance, heals all wounds. All we need to get by is a shoulder to cry on, a person to whom it’s perfectly okay to admit that our world is falling apart and that we have no idea what to do. 

For 22-year-old chess player Ivan Koubek, it’s not apparent who this person is in the wake of his father’s death. He’s estranged from his mother, and his relationship with his older brother Peter is strained at best. Nor is he a social butterfly outside of his family. Rooney places him firmly within the savant stereotype; Ivan is obsessively analytical, helplessly awkward, and endlessly self-deprecating. Like many of us, Ivan overthinks social interactions. Plagued with “minor regrets, like asking that woman Margaret whether she played chess,” he can’t help but dwell on past mistakes even as he realizes the futility of doing so. 

But let’s be honest: life isn’t that deep! Margaret — the 36-year-old director of the art center where Ivan plays chess — doesn’t think his question makes him seem “psychotically fixated on chess,” but just “slightly awkward … as high-IQ people usually are.” As the pair strike up a secret affair — despite being far apart and in completely different stages of life — it becomes clear that these conversational minutiae don’t matter nearly as much as Ivan thinks. Maybe all that counts between two people are the feelings they give each other. In the “onwardly flowing blur of all experience” that is life, precise details fall away; our lives are bound more by emotion than rationality. Unlike chess, human existence is an undecidable game. Thrust into a surprise romance, Margaret wonders: “What if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?” Margaret, who arrives in Ivan’s life by chance, becomes its anchor. Like him, she is going through a period of uncertainty and loss. The void left behind by her divorce looms over everyday existence. Both grieving — one over a lost parent, the other over lost time — they find relief in each other. 

On her part, Margaret enjoys the careless pleasure of their trysts, the “desperately embarrassing situations” that she nevertheless seeks out. And for the first time, Ivan finds an escape from the prison of genius he is pigeonholed into. With her, he expresses his love-hate relationship with chess without inhibition:

I was playing really well for a while, I mean, really well. But I’m not able to play like that anymore. I don’t know why. It makes me depressed when I think about it. You have all these dreams that you’re going to keep getting better and better. And then in reality you just start getting worse, and you don’t even understand why. 

As a washed-up competitor myself, Ivan’s speech feels painfully relatable. It’s hard to admit to being mediocre at your thing when you’ve spent years and years toiling over hundreds of books on every aspect of the game. And for what? To push on until you can’t take pleasure in what you once loved? It’s a kind of sunk cost fallacy: the impossibility of giving up what you’ve dedicated your life to. But with Margaret, who doesn’t care about IM norms or FIDE rating, Ivan is freed from the measurements of skill that quantify his value in the chess world. Lying in bed with her, thinking about  “how much fun it would be for them to play together,” he begins to recover his childlike enthusiasm for the game — learning to once again love chess for its own sake.

I have to admit that this piece has been wrapped up in the relationship between Ivan and Margaret — likely because Ivan’s rediscovery of joy in chess so closely parallels my own. Years ago, in a slump and having proclaimed in an adolescent rage that I was “quitting chess,” I left my favorite pastime behind and vowed to never return. Inevitably, I was drawn back. The rare game with my parents turned into teaching weekly classes at my old preschool, and soon enough I returned to the tournament hall. But competition no longer felt like something to be dreaded. My conception of chess had by then been infused with love and happy memories, and for the first time in a long time I smiled as I shook my opponent’s hand. Maybe Ivan felt the same way. 

“Intermezzo” portrays love variously, but what persists throughout these permutations is its power to heal. With her fourth — and in my opinion, best — novel, Sally Rooney weaves a beautiful web of complex yet tender relationships. Aside from that of Ivan and Margaret, Peter’s devotion to Sylvia, his self-sacrificing former partner, is placed in conflict with his desire for Naomi, a carefree younger woman. To uncover this intrigue, you’ll have to read the book! I’ll end with my favorite quote, which perfectly encapsulates the novel’s theme in Rooney’s characteristic stream-of-consciousness prose: “Even if it’s rare, to have a few times in life and no more, still worth living for, he thinks. To have met her like this: beautiful, perfect. A life worth living, yes.” After reading “Intermezzo,” I’m inclined to agree: love is what makes life worth living.