Intermezzo

Peter and Ivan Koubek are brothers a decade apart, a barrister in his thirties and a competitive chess player barely out of his teens, thrown into uneasy proximity by their father's death from cancer and the very different ways each of them is failing to grieve him. Peter has spent years drifting between two relationships he cannot resolve, a settled, years long connection with Sylvia, a former partner whose chronic pain has left their relationship non physical since a car accident years earlier, and a newer, more impulsive involvement with Naomi, a much younger woman whose financial precarity Peter never quite stops noticing even as he tells himself it does not matter to him. Ivan, isolated and awkward, begins a relationship with Margaret, an arts center director fourteen years his senior recently separated from an alcoholic husband, and Peter's open contempt for the age gap, delivered without much self awareness given his own relationship with Naomi, drives a wedge between the brothers that widens into a real estrangement over their father's belongings and their competing versions of who he was. The brothers' argument eventually turns physical, a scene the novel does not soften, before the two reach something like a reconciliation at one of Ivan's chess tournaments, where Margaret's steady presence helps thaw what months of silence could not. Rooney ends the novel without resolving Peter's own triangle outright, closing instead on a fragile agreement between the brothers to spend Christmas together, treating that ordinary, undramatic plan as the real achievement after everything that came before it.

Rooney gives each brother a genuinely distinct prose style, Peter's chapters restless and fragmented, cutting between his competing relationships and his own circling thoughts, Ivan's more literal and exposed, closer to how an anxious twenty two year old actually narrates his own feelings to himself. It is Rooney's longest novel and her least ironic, largely dropping the wry, flattened voice of her earlier books for something more overtly emotional, and readers used to that earlier register may find the shift disorienting at first; it rewards patience, particularly through Peter's sections, which ask a reader to sit inside real confusion rather than a tidy account of it.