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Intermezzo, the first new book by Sally Rooney in three years, comes freighted with expectations. What will our first great millennial novelist do next? Will her new offering leave readers as emotionally wrecked as her previous works? 

Rooney, who is Irish, writes elegant, emotionally rich novels, mostly about young people in Dublin struggling to navigate their endlessly fraught love lives under late capitalism. Her first two novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), were both runaway successes. They were adapted into hit TV shows and launched the careers of their young stars. 

Professionally beautiful people kept getting photographed carrying the books around, with covers in strategically prominent places, like they were the hot new handbag of the season. 

Rooney is that rarest of creatures, a unicorn of the 21st century, a celebrity author of literary fiction. Any new book by her faces a certain amount of unavoidable scrutiny: After all this time, does she still live up to the hype?

I’m happy to report that Intermezzo is exquisite. While the experimental and polarizing Beautiful World (2021) stayed largely out of the minds of its characters, with occasionally chilly results, Intermezzo is all rich inner monologue, as deeply felt as Normal People. 

What’s more, it offers something for which Rooney seems to have been looking for a long time: a new way forward through the central concerns of her work. In Intermezzo, love is played out through familial relationships rather than just romances, with male characters rather than dry intellectual women — and Rooney appears, for the first time, to be ready to stop apologizing for the romanticism of her work.

Rooney’s previous novels played with Austen/Brontë tropes. In Normal People, college students Connell and Marianne are clearly meant for each other, but they keep breaking up in part because of their class differences. In Conversations with Friends, young Frances has to navigate her love for older, married Nick. This is the stuff of the marriage novels of 19th-century England, updated with texting and Marxism.

Intermezzo, in contrast, is a play on the great Russian novels. It’s interested in questions about God, how we care for each other, and what gives life meaning.

At the center of Intermezzo are two brothers, Peter and Ivan, lapsed Catholics struggling with the recent death of their father.

Peter is 32, a lawyer, fastidious about the cut of his suits and the fabric of his scarves and the way he smiles at strangers, so as “to convey to the world at large a genial disposition.” Ivan is 22 and painfully awkward, still wearing braces, and considers himself almost incapable of interacting with other people. 

As a pair, they form a kind of study in different ways self-hatred can manifest: through either indifference to the outside world or meticulous attention to it. 

We meet Peter and Ivan in the immediate aftermath of their father’s funeral, but both of them have other problems to deal with.

Peter is still in love with his ex-girlfriend Sylvie, but after a vaguely-described traumatic injury has left her unable to have sex, she’s broken things off with him. (The plot devices you can get away with when you’re Sally Rooney!) Now he’s entangled with a college student and camgirl named Naomi, and fears he might be falling in love with her, too.  

Meanwhile, Ivan, a once-precocious teen chess prodigy, has seen his ranking drop in recent years and finds himself steadily more depressed to be living a life organized around chess, as he feels he probably hit his peak at age 15. His life starts to turn around when he meets 36-year-old Margaret, an elegant divorcée living in a small town where Ivan plays an exhibition chess game. 

Their developing relationship is redemptive for Ivan, who has always considered himself beneath the attention of women, but ruinous for Margaret’s reputation in her conservative town. And while Peter is himself dating a college student, he doesn’t think it plausible that a “normal woman” of Margaret’s age would want anything to do with Ivan.

The fight the brothers have over Margaret spirals out of control to be about their entire lives: how they cared for their father, how they should care for the family dog, what they owe to one another.

One of the big questions in this novel is the question of God. Ivan thinks he can find God when playing really good chess: “It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all.”

Margaret, meanwhile, says that she doesn’t think about God in terms of beauty. “I suppose my idea of God is more to do with morality. What’s right and wrong,” she says.

This binary between beauty and morality is traditionally at the center of Rooney novels. Her books are obsessed with whether or not it’s all right to live a life focused on aesthetic pleasure — playing chess like Ivan or writing stories like Connell in Normal People— when so much is wrong with the world and there’s so much political work to be done. 

Is it all right, Rooney novels tend to wonder, fretfully, to devote your life to the beauty of novels when, after all, probably the only morally correct thing to do in our current society is to start a Marxist revolution and blow up pipelines?

Strikingly, though, in Intermezzo, Rooney introduces this binary and then collapses it almost immediately, developing the idea that perhaps the things in our lives that are beautiful and bring us joy should be embraced, even if other people might think that they’re wrong, and that perhaps this will lead us to goodness as God understands it.

In chess, an intermezzo is an “in-between” move that turns a game in an unexpected direction. One way of reading Rooney’s Intermezzo might be as a bridge piece between the books she wrote in her 20s and what’s coming in her 30s.

In the meantime, Intermezzo works beautifully as a book all its own. It’s as tender and lovely as you could ask for, and beneath the elegant rise and fall of Rooney’s oceanic sentences, the waters go deep.

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The Mark Robinson scandal, explained: On Thursday, CNN reported that Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, had identified himself as a “black NAZI!” on a porn forum, as well as making a slew of other unsavory comments about race and his sexual interests. Robinson, an extremely right-wing candidate previously endorsed by former President Donald Trump, has opted to stay in the race despite public concerns. Here’s what Robinson’s digital footprint has revealed, and how it might affect his political aspirations.

Are we barreling toward an election legitimacy crisis? According to a recent poll, a quarter of Republicans think that former president Donald Trump should try to overturn the election results if he loses. According to another poll of Republicans who don’t believe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate, nearly one-third said that they expect “a lot” or “a great deal” of political violence after the November election. These concerning beliefs may stem from the fact that among Republicans, Trump himself may be their most trusted source of information about election results, charting much higher than local and national news outlets.

Things are looking sunny for solar: Solar only provides around 5.5 percent of the world’s electricity, but over the past decade, the price of solar electricity has gone down by 89 percent.  As the technology continues to improve, the United States will invest $40 million to bring more of the solar energy supply chain to the country.

Another reason to be wary of AI: OpenAI’s latest model, o1, also known as Strawberry, is the first major large language model (LLM) release with a “think, then answer” approach built in. While artificial intelligence’s ability to reason is a major improvement, it also intensifies some of the dangerous long-term capabilities of AI that researchers and safety advocates have been interested in trying to mitigate.

The animal DNA debate: While matters of biodiversity are typically regulated by a United Nations treaty, biotech advances are making it easier than ever for companies to sequence and analyze animal DNA — and for them to create vaccines and other commercial products without sharing the benefits with local communities.

The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is streaming now: Before you watch the Ryan Murphy true-crime series on Netflix, here’s a refresher on the highly publicized trial of the brothers, ages 21 and 18, who shot and killed their parents in their family’s Beverly Hills mansion in 1989. [New York Times]

Shohei Ohtani’s big record: Star Los Angeles Dodgers player Shohei Ohtani recently became the first major league baseball player to exceed 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a season. Ohtani achieved the milestone in his 150th game and was already the fastest and the sixth player in MLB history to hit 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases in a single season. [NPR]

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I remember the winter break I spent feverishly putting together my college applications in 2005, locked away from my family, obsessively writing and rewriting those pesky essays. Ever the neurotic procrastinator, I waited right up until the January deadline to hit the submit button and felt that my whole future was hanging in the balance.  

If anything, the college application process has gotten even more competitive and high stakes for the million students who vie for admission each year. That’s why we thought it would make a great subject for Vox senior reporter Allie Volpe to take on, as the school year gets underway and that heady mixture of dread and anticipation hangs in the air. 

Allie’s compassionate, deeply reported guide to college application season tackles all the most stressful parts of the process, from “what admissions officers really want to read in college essays,”  to “You got into college. How will you pay for it?”  And then there’s my personal favorite, “Applying to college? Seven current students on how to stand out and stay sane,” which features actual undergraduates on the hefty emotional and logistical challenges of this fraught time.

— Naureen Khan, senior culture editor

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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