Chamber music

In Sally Rooney's writing, I was told, nothing tremendously consequential ever happens; it is all inside your head. I had no idea of what that meant though, until I read through Intermezzo, her latest. And this reading was a revelation of what effect prose can yield, and how, under the will and craft of a maestro, it can bend and transform into a device which is quite novel.

The book starts with conversations about a funeral, and this death of a father shadows the entirety of the book, and the lives of the brothers Peter and Ivan. But it is only in the last hundred pages that the unfathomable idea of loss becomes visceral, as if, echoing how the slow-release of grief is fundamentally different from shock. One of the several ways in which this loss is looked at, in the aftermath of a fight between brothers, is as the absence of a forcefield:

In the past, Peter and Ivan might have called each other names, and worse: but to criticise their father in this way, no...Not because of any rules, but because of that feeling, the forcefield kind of feeling, which silently prevented certain words from being spoken, certain acts from taking place..By using such cold critical words, it was as if Peter was intent on proving the absence of their father, in whose presence those words would not have been spoken..

When I started reading, the first thing that hit me were these two distinct views I was getting through the voices and minds of the two brothers that the story braids. With the accomplished, eloquent barrister Peter, it is like watching an unedited movie shot in GoPro or adopting the first person view in a Minecraft game. I needed a good amount of time to appreciate what Rooney was doing here with the form - bringing out the agitated interiority - beyond the realm of words. Walking with Ivan, the younger and unsettled chess prodigy, is a different exercise - the flow of sentences seem to reflect an inner tranquility and content that is perhaps not fully understood by the protagonist.

But Rooney does much more. Sometimes she compresses an entire flow of thought in a simple phrase:

looks unseeing at a candlestick

Sometimes, she is speaking of one thing, passionately, but to have a completely different emotional effect that the character internally feels.

Like this section where Margaret, Ivan's love interest, is encountering her mother and conformity of life:

This is what you get, Bridget seemed to be saying, for being different. Well, it's true, after all, Margaret thinks...To work in a nice place with a few interesting people, to have friends with whom to discuss life and ideas. To attend theatre, to hear live music...To exercise once again,...the power to charm and fascinate, to be the object of an intense and searching desire.

Or, the section about Peter's transgressions as viewed through Ivan's lens:

..because Peter and Sylvia, who had been practically married, were broken up, and Peter stopped coming home, stopped sending Ivan funny messages and chess puzzles...He did not like his family anymore, any of them...He avoided them, and in a way, they avoided him too...You could tell their dad was relieved that Peter wasn't coming home so often, not that he didn't love him, but just that the situation had become so awkward...Peter was such a difficult person, always making life difficult.

The Yoda-like phrasing of sentences (his coat he takes off), and the inherent causality of observation and impact, once you get the hang of it, starts feeling more natural than the way we are used to see sentences written down.

A beautiful echo:

[Ivan and Margaret] Turns over to face her. The fine delicate filigree of lines at the corner of her eyes.: moving he finds and beautiful

Images from two viewpoints, merging:

[Peter and Sylvia] Since last week, their unspoken arrangement. Morning he waited at the hospital while she had the procedure...Tea they had given in a plastic cup, and dry toast. Now, you know she can't drive for forty-eight hours, the nurse was saying. Felt overcome looking. Small and frail in her patterned gown. Remembering everything. She, his father. clinical air quality, sterile light.

Rooney also shows tremendous ease in slowing down a scene, like a camera coming back to the same spot, but each revelation building up on the previous, like when she describes one of the early intimate scenes between Ivan and Margaret:

Palm of his hand resting low on her belly under the hollow of her navel

Warmth of his hand low on her belly, between her hipbones, heavy

His palm resting warm on the soft shallow dish of her belly

Low on the flat of her belly he stills his hand

Apart from the ending (cannot call it climax), which is done with such care and philosophical acceptance of life's complications and is my absolute favorite, two other scenes lingered on in my mind much after finishing the reading. The first one is the visit to the sea, Margaret and Ivan, so much reflecting, refracting and absorbing the current state of their relationship. The second one is the mid-week dinner between the brothers, where they seem to be almost getting each other, but almost.

The passing of seasons (or is it always raining?) or the hours inside a bar in Rooney's prose do not simply mark time. They draw the reader out of the characters' minds, where dwelling for too long can be disorienting like an intensive care unit patient, and ground the reader in the reality of the existence of these minds in the first place. And such beauty these vignettes are:

[Ivan in shower, Margaret observing] The passing weeks have seen autumn into winter. Sunlight on the treetops falls cold and clear now over loosening leaves.

[Ivan, walking to his mother's] The air around him is filled with an indistinct grey rain, like a very fine beaded curtain through which has continually to walk

[Margaret and Anna] Cold rush of rain from the street...Pink halo of mist glowing around each streetlamp... Busy tonight the Cobweb with its old framed advertisements, sweetish stale odor of hops.. (and after something that happens inside the pub that blindsides Margaret) For a moment Margaret rests in the pleasant bony discomfort of Anna's embrace, the scent of her house, apples, dish soap..

[Peter, with his colleagues/friends] Let me get a drink first. Anyone wants anything? Back at the table with a glass in his hand, cold, the fresh wet taste faintly savoury in his mouth, he experiences a moment of peace in which nothing of significance seems to be wrong with his life after all (and then, down to his fifth or sixth drink) another mouthful, lukewarm now and tasteless. Such is the life of a drink.

Death is a constant companion in this novel, not as a vestige of grief, but as a potent possibility for Peter:

Thought rises calmly to the surface of his mind: I wish I was dead. Same as everyone sometimes surely. Idea occurs, that is. Remembering something embarrassing you did years ago and abruptly you think: that's it, I'm going to kill myself. Except in this case, the embarrassing thing is his life. Doesn't mean he wants to really... Deepest and most final of desires. Something bitter in it too, luxuriously bitter, yes. And why not. Why doesn't he, that is, if the idea is so consoling. Oh, for other people of course: to protect them. Other people prefer you to suffer.

And so is life:

A few others arrive, another glass, two, and gradually the feeling softens.Thoughts wash slowly in and through, lap of water on shore... Did you win? she asks. Feels himself smiling, his hand on her hip. For today, yeah, he says. She laughs, pink tongue, flash of silver. So sexy, she replies...Naomi playing with his fingers. Music throbbing like a migraine. Drunk enough to dance with her, he wonders. Life perfect and everlasting until the end of the song.

The book quotes many other texts, via the characters, and meticulously cites them at the end. One of the key influences seems to be German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Philosophical investigations. Wittgenstein, in his later works, argued that language shapes thought by defining the limits of what can be understood, acting as a structure for perception rather than just a tool for expression. It is as if language itself is a form of life, teeming with possibilities. All throughout the book, what Rooney does with language is perhaps a great tribute to this school of thought.

In the time span of about a year, the brothers, and the others do not crumble or radically transform in any cascade of events. Rather, they start seeing possibilities within the burgeoning demands of life, which life itself offers. For a reader who is hungry for a little more than the story arc, Rooney shows how, beyond the choice of the one or the other, a third possibility exists. That grief and desire, loyalty and resentment, Naomi and Sylvia can exist in the same psychic space, less conflicted.