Love/Pain: Attraction and Repulsion in Intermezzo
Investigating the Magnetism of Sally Rooney and her characters
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Sally Rooney is a story.
A real person too, I’m sure of it, but Sally-Rooney-the-Author is a captivating narrative of allure and aloofness, titillation and talent. Each time she reemerges into the public view (or into a curated exhibition of tightly-scheduled audiences) to promote a new novel, she rides a wave of anticipation exhilaration to the top of the bestseller lists. She energises the whole world of books.
Her publishers understand this of course, and do their best to amplify this wave they ride along with her—her new novel Intermezzo was launched with the biggest trade campaign ever. But this campaign only amplified and harnessed the author’s own seemingly effortless magnetism, and so, as far as marketing drives go, felt strangely authentic.
Sally-Rooney-the-Author is enigmatic, in her reticence, and her apparently sincere disinterest in our interest in her as a person. And she’s also startlingly charismatic, when she does emerge—soft-spoken and withering; proud and modest; confident, somehow, in her own vulnerability. Crackling with contradiction, she gazes calmly at us (or perhaps over our shoulder) and suggests we just read her books.
Her books, which are powered by casts of characters each charged with their own Magnetic Energy—their own singular blend of mystique and charm, arrogance and vulnerability. And it’s their interactions, the various forms of intercourse between these characters, that create the novels’ plots.
To try to understand why her characters are so captivating, and how she makes their interactions so compelling, let’s look closely at the lead players in Intermezzo, and their various attractions and repulsions.
We begin like this:
Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent. On such occasions, one could almost come to regret one’s own social brilliance.
That’s one brother thinking about the other, at their father’s funeral.
PETER, the socially brilliant one, is at thirty-two already an accomplished human-rights lawyer. In college, he was a serial winner on the debate circuit, and throughout his twenties he brought a series of stunning girlfriends home on his arm. Today, he lights up lecterns at Trinity College, and his closing arguments at the Four Courts make the national press.
But Peter’s successes seem to have only confronted him with the grim realisation that none of it means anything. He’s trapped in a cycle of depressive thinking, questioning his own worth to the point that he sometimes contemplates suicide.
On the boardwalk by the river a little girl wearing a leopard-print hat, eating an ice cream cone. Thought rises calmly to the surface of his mind: I wish I was dead.
IVAN, ten years younger, still wears braces at twenty-two. He’s got none of his brother’s ease with people, but he does exude his own distinctive brand of charm. He is principled, and buys all his clothes (except underwear) second-hand, including that ill-fitting suit he wore at the funeral. And he’s very very good at chess, and gets invited to exhibitions around the country, where he is challenged by ten members of a local chess club, and simultaneously defeats them. And he is, we learn, starting to grow into himself, and looking more and more like his handsome older brother.
But Ivan too is carrying around with him a deep sadness, rooted not in success, but failure. The one time he had full sex, he went home and cried, “hating himself more at that moment than maybe ever before in his life.” He may have had some opinions, about women, that he’s no longer proud of. And despite his early promise at chess, his progress has stalled, and he’s starting to realise that he might not be quite talented enough to make it as a pro.
“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.” [Is this the author’s anxiety speaking through her character? Who knows!?]
These brothers are both exceptional, in their particular ways, and they also carry inside them that Rooney-esque contradiction. Successful and broken. Open and shut.
Perhaps it’s natural, then, that they are drawn to similarly complicated women.
Peter is still infatuated with whip-smart academic SYLVIA, his best friend/ex-girlfriend/true love, who is an even more popular figure on the Trinity campus than he is, and who suffered a terrible accident when they were in their early twenties, and soon broke up with him because she remains in too much pain to live a ‘normal’ life.
And he’s also besotted with NAOMI, who is twenty-two, pulls fried chicken apart with her oily fingers, and luxuriates in the feel of the new dresses he buys her on her ample curves. And who is facing eviction, and sometimes takes explicit photographs of herself and sells them on the internet.
MARGARET, at thirty-six, is the personable program director at her local arts centre, and apparently the coolest person in the small town where Ivan performs a chess exhibition in Chapter One. And she still feels very beholden to her rural community’s closed, claustrophobic values, and very judged by her neighbours—and her own mother—for leaving her abusive, alcoholic husband.
So: five characters, who each in their own way turn heads when they walk into a room. And who each have some underlying pain that, if we met them, we might feel compelled to try to understand and maybe even heal.
But magnetic characters don’t only seize the attention of the reader. They also, of course, inevitably start to attract and repel one another…
Though he is already in a coffin when the novel begins, the brothers’ father continues to hold them in his sway. Before he died, he lived through five years of cancer treatment, and this long goodbye coincided with Ivan’s attenuating chess prowess, and Peter’s escalating spiral into depression. In the aftermath of his death, his sons are bereft, and they are angry. Ivan’s mad at Peter for giving the eulogy, all smooth-talk and empty-platitudes. And Peter’s mad at his dad, for leaving him.
When alive, their dad was a conciliatory presence, and helped his sons keep a lid on their simmering tensions. But now, gone forever, he’s left them raw, and charged with a rage for which they will need to find an outlet…
While most love stories involve a powerful attraction between two people1, the forces connecting the lovers in Intermezzo are much more complex. When Margaret2 meets Ivan, for example, “his words give her a strange feeling, a feeling in the pit of her stomach.” When he asks if he can kiss her, she “doesn’t know what to do, whether to laugh again, or start crying.” When he does kiss her, she thinks: “It is, of course, a desperately embarrassing situation – a situation which seems to render her entire life meaningless.”
The conflict isn’t only between the lovers and the world, as they try to overcome a series of obstacles in order to be together. It plays out deep within each character, as they try to make sense of the turmoil of attraction and revulsion the other generates within them.
Peter wants to preserve his friendship with Sylvia, and to help her find some happiness in her life that is otherwise plagued by her chronic pain. And he resents her for leaving him, and he craves her body, and he longs to return to that time in their lives, before her accident, when they were young and happy.
And he wants to protect Naomi from everyone who wants to exploit her (especially older men like himself), and he hates the way she makes him feel old and lecherous, and he finds her youthful exuberance and sheer sexuality—the way she makes him feel young and powerful and, in a further contrast to Sylvia, actually begs him to hurt her—impossible to resist.
Like most siblings3, Peter and Ivan share a bond that, despite all their bickering, relentlessly draws them back together.
As the elder sibling, Peter feels protective of Ivan, even when he’s stubborn and ungrateful, and resents him for giving him a reason not to kill himself. “To go on living just for Ivan’s sake, imagine. Too depressing to think.”
Ivan can’t avoid wanting to impress his brother, even after deciding he’s essentially a bad person. And even though he’s determined not to care about what Peter thinks, nothing aggravates him like his brother’s condescension.
Peter: Do you think a normal woman of her age would want to hang around with someone in your situation?
Ivan: I actually hate you. I’ve hated you my entire life.
Peter: I know.
These various attractions and repulsions generate the story of Intermezzo, as the characters veer away from, and swing back towards, one another, across more than 400 pages.
Other forces help complete the picture. Sylvia pushes Peter towards Naomi, who pushes him back to Sylvia. Sylvia pushes Peter towards Ivan. Margaret’s arrival drives the brothers apart, before she then pushes Ivan back towards Peter, then Peter towards Ivan. The boys’ largely-estranged mother pushes them towards each other, even as they drive each other back to her. And their grief over losing their father, while drawing other characters towards them, threatens to irremediably rupture their bond.
But this grief is also the one important thing they have in common, other than genes, and their shared pain is the one force that might be strong enough to finally (at least for now!) reunite them, and help them help each other come to terms with their loss.
So what can we learn from Intermezzo? What advice can we take forward into our own storytelling? Here’s a checklist of takeaways:
Find ways to set our characters apart from the rest of humanity (and one another) by making them extraordinary in some way.
Make them enigmatic, or charming, or both. Give them a specific place in the world where people notice them when they walk into a room.
Don’t make their charm straightforward—lace it with some deep-rooted pain or discontent, so that even when they are wooing rooms, they are on some level deeply uncomfortable.
Make the connections between the characters work both ways—not just attraction or repulsion, but attraction and repulsion.
Remember that sex always complicates everything.
Finally, a note on Story Energies terminology: everything that is present in these characters before the story begins—debating prowess, chess mastery, chronic pain—is what we call Potential Energy. Once the characters start exerting force on the reader, and on each other, that Potential is converted into Magnetic Energy, which can then in turn start generating emotions (Electrical Energy), tension (Elastic Energy), and more. For an introduction to the eight forms of Story Energy, read this quick primer.
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The Cast:
IVAN: Kodi Smit-McPhee, circa The Power of the Dog
PETER: Jamie Dornan, circa 50 Shades of Grey
MARGARET: Kerry Condon, circa The Banshees of Inisherin
SYLVIA: Carey Mulligan, circa She Said
NAOMI: Scarlett Johansson, circa Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Special guest appearance: Frasier’s Dad4
Disagree with these choices? Have a better idea? Let me know in the comments!
For more on traditional love stories, read my post on Romeo & Juliet:
Margaret, along with Peter and Ivan, is the third point-of-view character in the novel—perhaps because Rooney felt we needed her perspective to understand her attraction for Ivan.
For more on sibling bonds, read my post on His Three Daughters:
John Mahoney, RIP.
Oh. This is delightful. I absolutely adore the actor photos and blurbs. Btw did you notice how frequently she uses the word “obviously? “ I listened to normal people so I can tell you it came up very frequently. I love your take on this and particularly your connections with what we can learn about writing. Well done
Love! Love! Love! It's the conflict and "turmoil of attraction and revulsion" that I love most about Rooney's novels—the contradictions are so real. You're right about the Intermezzo cast, too. Nailed it.