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In Sally Rooney’s novels, love is always being bought, sold, or reduced to tropes. But this is also what makes it real.
Intermezzo reimagines this dynamic several times over, such that one is forced to use the shorthand of a dating site to describe it: Peter Koubek (32m), a human-rights lawyer, finds himself in a love triangle with Naomi (23f), a college student and sometime sex worker, and Sylvia (32f), a chronically ill English professor who broke his heart years ago. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence.” Sure enough, learning that Ivan has told his brother about their relationship, Margaret cannot help but imagine with horror the kind of person Peter must think she is: “a middle-aged woman taking advantage of a naive grieving boy, and for what, for her own gratification, her own pleasure.” At the last moment, however, the story takes an unexpected turn: “Just for a second or two when you’re inside her, and she’s trembling and shivering and saying your name, you’re thinking about me, about things we did together when we were younger, like in Paris when I let you finish in my mouth, and you’re remembering how good it felt.” This sudden glimpse of Eileen’s consciousness through the blinds of fiction is what makes Simon come.
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