Is 'Intermezzo' Sally Rooney's 'Howards End'?

Fran Magazine: Issue #127

📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). The way this works is that Wednesday (regular) issues are free for all and Sunday (dispatch) and reread diary issues are for paid subscribers only. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine, and feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd. 📝

Mug update

At the time of writing, a first round of mugs has gone out. All of the mugs? Not quite. But I am working on it. Again, something to remember: small business owners are the troops and I am a soldier in the war against, uh, waiting in line at the post office (?) and in the war on capitalism (I am fighting on the side of capitalism, sadly). A few people asking: will there be pre-orders available for December? Short answer: yes. Long answer: when I figure out how to do that, yes.

The Rooney Report

🚨🚨 this section will have SPOILERS for the new Sally Rooney novel 🚨🚨 if you do not want to be spoiled, jog on 🚨🚨

Over the weekend, I finished reading Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo.¹ I had been reading at a pace that was faithful to

Clare

’s book club, but on Saturday morning I woke up earlier than anticipated and went to the couch and read the last 150 or so pages all in one go. Intermezzo started quite slow. I’d said to someone prior to its release that I hoped to breeze through it in two days as I had with Conversations with Friends and Normal People; “It’s, uh, 450 pages,” my friend told me. It wasn’t until I was about 75 pages into Intermezzo that I got “into” the book and felt like I knew what it was “doing,” which is to say that much of what’s here feels like a significant step forward (and also sideways) for Rooney’s work.

I like Sally Rooney’s work. I have read all her novels, and I have mostly kept up with their releases. I think I read Conversations and Normal People within about a month of each other in 2018. My light ranking that I can’t be held to in any meaningful sense would look something like this:

1. Beautiful World, Where Are You

2. Intermezzo

3. Conversations with Friends

4. Normal People

As far as I recall, the biggest criticism of Beautiful World, Where Are You is that millennial women would not be writing such long emails to each other. Okay, realism alert! That said, I am always writing a long email to my friends.

In a conversation with Merve Emre in The Paris Review, Emre writes that “Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo to James Joyce’s Ulysses.” These parallels range from “that tracks” to this, though Rooney herself admits this is more of an afterthought of what was on her mind than a deliberate attempt at a modern retelling or even a fanfic-ified version of those original classics.

On reading Intermezzo, I came to realize that what Rooney is doing is almost a version of E.M. Forster’s Howards End, a love story about siblings more than it is lovers.

I have long argued (okay, a few years) that Howards End is my favorite English-language novel, overtaking previous books that held that position like Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.² To be clear, I say “favorite” and not “best” — because Howards End is a huge mess with a crazy ending that doesn’t really “work” or necessarily satisfy, but one that leaves a great impact nonetheless.

Howards End is not about anyone named Howard, but instead a story of three families: The Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and the Basts. Forster focuses on the Schlegels, eldest Margaret, middle child Helen, and grad student Tibby.³ The Schlegels will strike most modern readers as a familiar type of family. They are leisure class liberals, living off a pretty meager inheritance on account of being orphans, renting property in London but by no mean increasing their wealth. Their lives are comfortable, and they are interested in vaguely leftist issues: socialism, welfare, education. They attend political discussions, they read books, they play music. They do not work for a living, and they have a handful of servants, but they are not, at least for the time, “rich.” The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, are not only very wealthy, with properties all across Southern England, but they are also full-on colonial capitalists, working in the rubber trade and sending their son to Africa and that kind of thing. They are aware of the stock trade, they are “banking world-adjacent,” and they have money to burn, though are disastrously cheap with little taste. The Basts, Leonard and Jacky, are purely working class: Leonard is perpetuating stewing in entry-level clerk work while Jacky occasionally moonlights doing sex work.

The core conflict of the novel revolves around the relationship and courtship between Margaret Schlegel — a spinster, kind of, at the age of 32 — and Mr. Wilcox — newly widowed and very lonely and in search of, like, “leftist gf who is 20 years younger⁴ and wants to argue over lunch.” These characters don’t agree on much, and there isn’t much sexual passion between them, but they do seem to deep down like each other’s company, for lack of any other, and hey, isn’t that sometimes enough? Only connect, etc.

There’s one person particularly unhappy, however, with Margaret’s relationship, and that’s her sister Helen, the more brash and outspoken of the two, whose values are even further left-leaning than her sister’s in a very annoying kind of way. Margaret’s courtship with Mr. Wilcox leads to what feels like a family ruining type of rift between them, sending Helen off to Germany to be pissed off and Margaret sending endless letters trying to get her sister to see her.

In Intermezzo, the best and most poignant relationship of the book is between brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek, ten years apart from age, and “different” in ways that prove them similar. Peter, the older one, is a “human rights lawyer” (mostly it seems like he does labor and tenants law, though someone can correct me) but he has a horrible vibe despite having ostensibly “good” views and “normal” social skills. He is still in love with his college girlfriend Sylvia who was injured in a horrible accident several years ago that leaves her in constant pain and either unwilling or unable to have penetrative sex. Instead, he is dating a 22 year old, Naomi, who he is often very mean to for no reason other than she is not Sylvia. Peter looks down on his younger brother Ivan, who somewhat neurodivergent, a kind of chess prodigy, maybe, who once had incel tendencies⁵ but has mostly leveled out and become normal about women. Ivan begins a relationship with an older divorced woman, Margaret⁶, who Peter insists must be in some way “abnormal” if she’s so interested in Ivan. This fight over a rare dinner between the brothers in the aftermath of their father’s death leads to a nearly-booklength silence between them.

BDM

wrote about the excellence of the sibling relationship for the Wall Street Journal, writing:

That’s another thing about siblings: They’re easy to lose. For most of your childhood, should you have a brother or a sister, they’re inescapable; their presence can be oppressive. But then one day you move out on your own and keeping in touch with your siblings turns out to require an act of will. It’s easy to drift apart without ever meaning to, as work and romance take over. A sibling relationship may fade amid adult chaos and lingering resentments, the sibling remaining in memory both more and less than a friend.

Rooney’s work has often centered around “marriage plots,” and I’m hard-pressed to think of any of her books where couples don’t end up back together, even if it spells out a somewhat miserable future. To that end, her work is not that dissimilar from someone like, say, Colleen Hoover, who always has an alternate man for whatever woman character has the misfortune of being the protagonist of one of her books. It is better to wind up partnered, and maybe a little doomed, than it is to be single, which I find both annoying and how 87% of people seem to actually think out in the world.

But the “will they/won’t they” of Intermezzo isn’t the Peter love triangle (who cares!⁷) or the Ivan age-gap relationship (which never really seems of any great risk of rupture as they two cannot stop going for walks and fucking — ideal vibe of any relationship, regardless of age), but Peter and Ivan, and whether they will be able to mend all of the hurt and pain they’ve caused each other throughout their lives. The two mirror, per my reading, the relationship between Margaret and Helen — the elder sibling a kind of sold-out liberal, making compromise to appear normal in a world that is not normal or just, concerned with a lack of money and having to keep it all together, and the younger sibling who is impulsive and romantic and deeply moral if not kind of annoying about it.

One of the things that I love about the Howards End Masterpiece Theatre adaptation — the Kenneth Lonergan one that I rewatched a few weeks ago — is that it makes the scene where Margaret and Helen finally see each other again after so many months so romantic. It’s real running “through the airport terminal” style stuff, the music swelling and all that. In the book, it’s equally tense though not quite as action-forward: Mr. Wilcox has labeled Helen as insane for her lack of straight-forward communication, and he is hoping to collect her, alongside Margaret, and take her to some kind of facility. Forster writes:

Margaret’s anger and terror increased every moment. How dare these men label her sister! What horrors lay ahead! What impertinences that shelter under the name of science! The pack was turning on Helen, to deny her human rights, and it seemed to Margaret that all Schlegels were threatened with her. Were they normal? What a question to ask! And it is always those who know nothing about human nature, who are bored by psychology and shocked by physiology, who ask it. However piteous her sister’s state, she knew that she must be on her side. They would be mad together if the world chose to consider them so.

Intermezzo folds into a similar conclusion, one that sends Peter careening through Dublin trying to get to Ivan on a day on his chess tournament. Their resulting conversation is very straight-forward, almost too bald, in their sorting out of the events of the novel that preceded this moment. Perhaps it’s all too obvious, but these are not people who are comfortable with each other. They have to say the thing they want to say in the most plain-stated way for fear of misinterpretation, the curse of their relationship. But both Intermezzo and Howards End come to a similar forward-looking conclusion: the horizon, the future, the holiday ahead. Peter and Ivan make plans to see each other at Christmas. Peter gets the last say of the novel, a reflection on his final words to Ivan before they depart again: “I’m happy. I love you. I’ll see you soon.” Easy words, likely to be said between any people of any caring relationship, though devastating in the context of having been said by a character who is otherwise so miserable throughout. Forster gives Helen the final lines of Howards End, which look not to Christmas or New Years, but to the harvest and the bounty ahead:

“The field’s cut!” Helen cried excitedly — “the big meadow! We’ve seen to the very end, and it’ll be such a crop of hay as never!”

1. Not to “make light” of the forthcoming presidential election — just kidding — but for the past few years, friend of the magazine Harris will text out of nowhere and request a Donald Trump impression of some zeitgeisty figure or phrase. This bit both replaced and supplemented our last version of this: Don Pardo impressions. I am by no means an impressionist of any skill, but that is the fun of it, and sending a four second voice note impression of someone is the lowest ask for maximum laughter. That said, while saying “Sally Rooney” in Trump voice is both easy and satisfying, “Intermezzo” presented a much more significant challenge. We both separately came to the conclusion he’d probably say it like “pizza,” so like “Intermetzo.” But we never really nailed it which, again, is part of the fun.

2. The former is probably the best English-language book about dropping out of grad school, whereas the latter is probably the best English-language book about turning 30. The best English-language book about being 29 is, of course, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.

3. I think Tibby is actually in undergrad but the personality type is “grad school,” which is to say, annoying.

4. In the Merchant Ivory adaptation, these characters are played by Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins, who I think is a little too old, and in the Kenneth Lonergan adaptation, these characters are played by Hayley Atwell and Matthew Macfadyen, who I think is a little too young.

5. I think a great part of the novel is that we learn this about Ivan after getting to know him a bit. By the time we learn he used to feel uneasy and resentful towards women but has sorted that out in his own way, we basically already like him so it’s like, okay, well, who cares? which more mirrors how we move through the world rather than doing an endless audit on everyone’s moral code, or whatever.

6. Ringing the Howards End alarm.

7. It’s the Peter love triangle that mostly doesn’t work for me — and for seemingly many others — in the book, in part because Sylvia and Naomi are too one-note. It helps with the Ivan-Margaret subplot that we often get a close third-person look into Margaret’s general point of view; we don’t get that between either of those other women. They are sort of rendered tropes — the virgin Sylvia and the whore Naomi — in a way that isn’t particularly interesting to me, and neither come off as fully realized as the other three in the book.