Sally Rooney is no stranger to exploring the complexities of the (monogamous) romantic relationship, but with her fourth novel, Intermezzo, the author challenges herself to explore the even more particular emotional intricacies of the sibling dynamic. Namely, among two brothers, Ivan (the youngest at twenty-two) and Peter (the eldest at thirty-two). The Koubek brothers, if you will. Although normally “estranged” (for all intents and purposes), the death of their father, whose spectral presence is further accentuated by never having his first name mentioned, forces them to come together for the requisite funeral at the outset of the novel. Already, Rooney displays a Dostoyevsky-esque flair with this family x funeral trope. But, in truth, it was fellow Irish author James Joyce’s influence (quelle surprise) that sparked the tone for Intermezzo. Along with, who else, William Shakespeare. After all, he is the progenitor of modern family drama.

Thus, with Ulysses and Hamlet as her guides, Rooney set about the task of creating a fraught family portrait. This extends to the Koubek brothers’ matriarch, Christine (and yes, they call her by her first name, as though to highlight the emotional distance between all of them). Obviously, she shows up to the funeral as well, even though she moved on with another man named Frank and started a different family years ago.

It is at the “uniting” event of this funeral that Christine reveals her somewhat blatant preference for Peter, the human rights lawyer who (theoretically) has his “shit together.” The attractive, polished, moneyed brother with a “good head on his shoulders.” Not like awkward, unkempt, anti-capitalist Ivan. A former chess prodigy-turned-freelance layabout. Indeed, Christine takes the opportunity to call Ivan out to Peter for his atrocious appearance at the funeral. Although not usually quick to defend his brother, Peter points out to Christine that perhaps how he looks isn’t exactly top of mind, what with their father having just died.

These out-of-nowhere “warm and fuzzy” feelings (by stoic Irish male standards, anyway) between the brothers persist when Ivan accepts an invitation from Peter to go out to dinner. As for Peter, although he’s the type of person who seems inherently “happy-go-lucky” and with friends always “at the ready,” the truth is that the only people he hangs out with are Sylvia, his ex-girlfriend, and Naomi, his current, much younger girlfriend. In fact, Naomi is twenty-three—pretty much the exact same age as Ivan. And yet, when Ivan slips up by mentioning to Peter that he’s been seeing a woman who’s thirty-six while at this fancy dinner of theirs (that, clearly, Peter is paying for), his elder brother is shockingly quick to judge. This made apparent when he responds to Ivan by saying, “Do you think a normal woman of her age would want to hang around with someone in your situation?”

After absconding from the dinner in a silent rage (yes, it’s all very highfalutin repressed Irish emotion), the phrase, “Do you think a normal woman…” keeps reverberating in Ivan’s head—this being the question asked by Peter about whether any woman in her “right mind” of such a “mature age” would go for him. Let alone a woman actually in Ivan’s age bracket. That, to Ivan, is the implication. The scathing shade being thrown. As though there’s something fundamentally wrong with/repellent about him. But no, Margaret Kearns, the director of an arts program in a small village called Leitrim, is the one who gives the greenlight to Ivan for things to take a sexual turn when he invites her back to his “accommodation” (booked by the chess club that helped send Ivan to this arts center) for the night, where she’s driven him in her role as the hospitality liaison, of sorts.

To both their surprise, they find themselves connecting on a deep level almost immediately, almost as if reading one another’s thoughts (this, too, being a frequent “Rooney staple” of male-female romances, especially in Normal People). However, it’s Ivan, needless to say, who is the most gung-ho about trying to arrange a meeting with her again, offering up his number and telling her to promise that if she ever finds herself thinking about him, that she should call. To Margaret’s own dismay—for she doesn’t want to feel an attraction, emotional and physical, to someone so much younger—she does end up thinking about him days later, and decides to take him up on his entreaty to call. Ivan, pleased to no end, is elated to hear from her. Not just because he’s crushingly lonely, and Margaret is the type of person he feels he can confide in, but because he knows, even at such a young age, that it’s extremely rare to genuinely connect with someone. More to the point, to be able to communicate wordlessly (read that as “telepathically,” if you must). The most profound of all forms of communication.

Peter is aware of this, too—even though he’s managed to finagle not one, but two important women in his life, try as he might to deny that his latest girlfriend, Naomi, is important to him. Unquestionably, there’s a part of him that relishes treating her like shit. Naomi expects him to, as a matter of fact. Seemingly wouldn’t want it any other way…and is almost off-put by his niceness at times. And he is nice to her. If one measures niceness solely by amounts of money doled out (in exchange for Naomi letting Peter do “whatever he wants” to her, usually roughly—which, of course, reeks of Marianne in Normal People). This is the aspect of their relationship that makes it both 1) decidedly “father-daughter” and 2) keeps Naomi in the continued role of sex worker. For, long before Peter came along, Naomi was selling explicit photos of herself online, and occasionally dating some men who treated her badly but probably helped her out financially as well.

Her perennially broke state is emphasized by her relegation to living in a squat, receiving several notices/court orders indicating that she will soon be forcibly removed if she doesn’t leave voluntarily. Peter, being a human rights lawyer and all, assures Naomi he’ll take a look at the notice and assist her in figuring out what to do next. But, naturally, Peter doesn’t deliver on his promise in time, and Naomi ends up being roughly carted away by the Gardaí—this after she’s been in a bit of a spat with Peter, who is only made aware of Naomi’s arrest when a friend of hers reaches out to him to let him know. And yes, Rooney is clearly accenting how a woman with no means and no man to back her up is routinely treated in this crude manner (which is also why Peter feels like he can treat her crudely, to boot).

It goes without saying that Ivan has absolutely no awareness of these dramatic events in his brother’s life, let alone that he even has a love interest beyond Sylvia, who Peter always continued to pine for even after she ended things due to a bad car accident that left her with the kind of chronic pain that makes sex totally anathema to her (one imagines Luigi Mangione has a similar issue). And yet, Sylvia was such a fixture in Ivan’s life when he was younger—almost like a sister—that it’s hard for him to imagine Peter ever being with someone else. Ivan also feels that, had Peter stayed with Sylvia, romantically speaking, his own relationship with his brother might not have deteriorated so spectacularly. For Ivan is convinced that Peter was a better person when he was with Sylvia—that Sylvia brought out the best in him and, now, without her as more than “just a friend,” he’s turned into a bit of a shit.

As Rooney describes from Ivan’s perspective, “Fundamentally Peter is a bad person, Ivan thinks, and Ivan’s own life would be in no sense worse and arguably a lot better if he never had to see or speak to him ever again. From now on, he will block his brother’s number from his phone and refuse to acknowledge him if they ever pass one another on the street.” To be sure, Intermezzo gives Rooney the chance to hone her skills when it comes to “bopping around” inside different perspectives without ever actually going fully inside the character’s head. In short, there’s still a touch of “narrator’s distance” between her and the character. Something that keeps her from going “fully in” (that something being, most glaringly, use of the first person).

And the more Ivan thinks about his brother, what he stands for—or, more to the point, doesn’t stand for—the more his blood boils (cue the sound of Taylor Swift’s opening verse to “Bad Blood”). And the less he cares about what Peter might think of him dating an older woman. As he sees it, “Margaret is, whatever Peter might think or say, in fact a normal woman. Even if she weren’t, it wouldn’t matter to Ivan, since unlike his brother he doesn’t assign an idiotically high, practically moral degree to the concept of normality, which phrased in another way means conformity with the dominant culture.” Of course, at the core of Ivan’s contempt for his brother is the self-loathing that Peter continues to bring out in him as he still can’t help “trying to be perceived as grown-up and sophisticated by a patronizing older sibling…” This is partly why, in addition to Peter’s “Margaret reaction,” Ivan bursts out with, “I actually hate you. I’ve hated you my entire life” at the restaurant. In the words of Cher Horowitz, “Way harsh, Tai.” Especially since, in many ways, Peter is simply fulfilling his role as “protective older brother.”

A role he can also toggle between with “empathetic older brother,” this being why he feels immediate guilt for the way he acted, with Rooney’s narration skills speaking for him in the form of: “Maybe he should have been happy his brother had found someone who seemed to enjoy his company.” Peter can even seem to find a shred of empathy for Margaret, and the reasons why she might “resort” to his brother: “Living in some hole in Leitrim, half-dead for want of a little excitement. Slim pickings no doubt.” Okay, so it’s bitterly and judgmentally empathetic, but empathetic nonetheless.

Rooney’s intent in making these two brothers foils for one another is all part and parcel of underscoring how grief invokes different responses from different personality types. While Ivan’s predisposition is for anger, Peter’s is for self-loathing and, accordingly, self-destructive behavior. And these two coping mechanisms come out tenfold in each brother in the aftermath of their patriarch’s death. To add to le drame of it all, there’s a property involved. Namely, the house where their father lived now legally belongs to Christine, who hasn’t said whether or not she intends to sell it. Ivan feels “it would be sad never to be able to go back to the house again, but he also doesn’t like to think of it sitting empty and no one living there.”

What’s more, it’s the house where Ivan enjoyed having an “elegant” (Margaret’s word) whippet named Alexei (the Russian name to be expected from a chess enthusiast). Here, too, Rooney is experimenting for the first time with an animal as a key character accelerating the narrative. But unfortunately, Alexei can’t stay with Ivan in his current lodging situation (instead trapped at cruel Christine’s abode during this interim period), for he lives with a roommate out in Ringsend, working part-time freelance jobs related to data analysis. Though he hasn’t been doing many of those lately, what with the funeral and the general emotional fallout of Mr. Koubek’s death.

A death that also draws attention to the dynamic Ivan has with his brother. And vice versa. Neither one is happy with the way things are between them, nor are they happy with each other as people. As for Ivan’s thoughts on their issues, “It seems to say something about Peter that when Ivan actually was a child, the two of them were good friends, but when Ivan became a thinking person with his own individuality, Peter didn’t like him or want to spend time with him anymore. And what it says, Ivan thinks, is that Peter likes people he can dominate and feel superior to, and he’s not such a great fan of people who talk back to him and disagree.”

Of course, he’s also willing to admit that he was a prat himself in his teenage years, what with all his anti-woman rhetoric, believing in what amounted to Andrew Tate-sanctioned “philosophies” like, “And how can feminists say they want equality, if what they really want is to be considered biologically more important than men? Feminists, it seemed to Ivan, were campaigning for a world in which men, far from being equal citizens, in fact had to give up their seats on public transport whenever any random woman decided to get pregnant, which happened constantly.”

With the advent of Margaret into his life, all such previous contemptuous feelings toward women dissipate entirely, with Ivan suddenly understanding why his brother was always an advocate for women, having been able to imagine one he loved in the kinds of harrowing situations that women alone are subjected to. Ivan can finally acknowledge how “that really was his view, at the time, which his brother had never been shy about denouncing and describing as ‘fascist’ and so on. Later, in college, Ivan came to feel more like: okay, whatever… He no longer felt annoyed or imposed on; rather he was filled with kindly and even tender feelings towards the woman who was pregnant [on public transport]. These feelings seemed, when he thought about it, to be connected with recent developments in his own life: his new understanding of relationships between women and men.” In other words, now that Ivan isn’t an incel anymore, he appears to have more “patience” for women, rather than trying to write off a bid for feminism as a bid for wiping all men off the face of the planet.

As the book goes on, it appears as though each brother, whether they want/intend to or not, starts to take up certain characteristics of the other. Characteristics they wished they had before, and once felt as a discernible lack when forced to be in their mutual presence. Like Didion and Babitz, they comprise two opposing but complementary parts of a larger whole: the yin yang. And, when split apart from one another, ultimately neither brother is whole. Try as both might to insist that they’re “fine” being separated. Treating the other like a stranger simply because they can’t seem to deal with their differences.

To make it all worse, language fails them. In the way that they use it and don’t use it. Hence, Ludwig Wittgenstein being an appropriate choice to kick off the novel via certain grief and chess-related quotes: “Don’t you feel sorrow now?” (“Aber fühlst du nicht jetzt den kummerand?”) and “Don’t you play chess now?” (“Aber spielst du nicht jetzt den schach?”). Each quote is differentiated by just two words in the philosopher’s native German tongue. But there is another unsaid Wittgenstein quote that overtly pertains to the Brothers Koubek. One that speaks to the failure of language to convey what a person is really feeling: “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” Communicating love through words, in general and as far as the Koubek brothers are concerned, certainly falls under that category.

So often, this is why love (and its inability to be truly, “accurately” expressed) can so often come across as hostility (and yes, one realizes this is the type of argument a toxic boyfriend might use). Particularly when, instead of saying nothing, the wrong thing is said. Case in point, Peter’s harsh judgment of Margaret when he first learns how old she is. On another level, the Wittgenstein aphorism can be taken to mean that when an emotion is so colossal—like grief or love—it simply can’t be spoken at all…not concisely anyway. Which is how it ends up coming out all wrong in one’s words and, consequently, actions. This being the tragedy that befalls the Koubek brothers in their respective weakened states. Making them opponents on the proverbial chessboard of life. Yet, as is Rooney’s way, she can’t conclude things with too much tragedy, throwing the reader a lifeline of hope by the time Intermezzo’s final act rolls around.