Whatever happened to FUN?

Famous and Beloved Book Club: Sally September in October, Issue 3

This is the second of a 4-post book club for Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. It covers Part 2 (up to page 330). Next week: finish the book!'

---

I think I hate Intermezzo.

In my first post in this series, I complained that Rooney’s books always peter out with no real, synthetic ending. Sometimes that is more meaningful than others, but it always runs the risk of, not necessarily being boring, but being “bleh.”¹ In the second post I championed the book’s exploration of unconventional romance, citing the dichotomies between disgusting Peter and incel-cum-altruist Ivan, real Margaret (not Sylvia) and unreal Naomi, as producing an interesting tension between feelings and “normalcy.” The book postures, at first, as a treatise about material vs. affect in the contemporary relationship (as all Rooney’s books are), but by the end of the second part hasn’t done much of that, at all. More interestingly, it has instead explored the “type”-ness of people that Rooney formally relies on, spending way more time on the nature of characters than on the material things that formed those natures, the opposite of what happens in Beautiful World, Where Are You (as far as I can remember—it feels like that book came out 100 years ago). That felt exciting, as did the unique romance between Ivan and Margaret.