Sally Rooney. Photograph by Kalpesh Lathigra.
Each of Sally Rooney’s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But while Rooney is delightfully conversant in the history of the novel, it is not, she says, her first thought when she starts to write. Her characters simply walk into her mind and stay there until she has puzzled out the precise nature of their relationships to one another. In Intermezzo, as in the novels that preceded it, her characters—Peter and Ivan Koubek, and the women they love—are often self-deceiving, misguided, and dishonest. No one’s intentions are pure. No one’s actions are consistent. Yet amid this tangle of secrets and lies there is, every so often, a glimmer of mutual understanding—a minor triumph in a world designed to erode all human exchanges and emotions. It is the burden and the pleasure of the novel, from Austen to Rooney, that it can animate these triumphs and the unbeautiful world from which they arise, so long as we keep turning the pages.
This summer, Rooney and I met in Dublin, where we mostly talked about novels, old and new. We met again on September 25, for a public conversation onstage at the Southbank Centre in London. Before Rooney and I began to speak, she delivered a brief statement condemning the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the deaths of civilians in Israel, in Palestine, and in Lebanon. She urged the audience “to keep protesting, to keep speaking out, to keep demanding an end to this horrifying war.” Although our conversation in London was a continuation of our earlier exchange, her words were a reminder that any discussion of the novel, cannot be, and must not be, isolated from a consideration of longer and broader histories—of death and dispossession, beauty and belonging.
INTERVIEWER
In Dublin this summer, we talked about contemporary novelists who, quite self-consciously, are writing back toward the history of the novel. You said something that stuck with me—“Many writers are contemptuous of the novel as a bourgeois form, but I love the novel.” How does one sustain that love for the novel at a time of horrific violence? More specifically, what shape does that love take in Intermezzo?
SALLY ROONEY
I stand by that. I do love the novel, and I think a lot about its specific textual lineage. My great friend Tom Morris is a fantastic short-story writer, and he often says short-story writers get asked about form, but novelists just get asked what their novels are about. We tend to forget that the novel isn’t just a big, long piece of text. When we say it’s a bourgeois form, what we mean is that it emerged coincident with the emergence of industrial capitalism, and it documented a kind of psychology, a kind of individuality that that historical moment produced and made possible, which was, at the time, a bourgeois subjectivity. Now, in the twenty-first century, most novels have been written by people who had to work for a living, who didn’t just live off passive income, capital income, and most protagonists of novels similarly don’t live off the riches of their tenant farmers, as the protagonists of nineteenth-century novels often did. How can contemporary novelists work in conversation with that textual lineage, respond to it, subvert it, make it more capacious, or change the kinds of subjectivity it’s capable of documenting?
INTERVIEWER
Loving the novel, then, not only gives it more life but allows it to represent different possibilities for life?
ROONEY
To say “reinvigorate it” might not be fair, because when was the novel not vigorous? It has always been a living form, but I do feel that, after the modernist period, there were serious challenges that the novel struggled to accommodate. “Postmodern writers” came up with fascinating answers, but I think the challenges remain. The questions asked by the modernist novel are the questions that we, as contemporary novelists, are trying to answer still. Loving the novel is a bit like a rebellious love, like a teenager’s reaction to their parents’ love.
INTERVIEWER
A half-smothered love.
ROONEY
Yes, you have to feel hemmed in by its limitations to truly love it, to feel excited by it. I like the limitations of the novel. I like feeling them pressing in on me while I’m trying to get close to my characters.
INTERVIEWER
One response to the valorization of individual subjectivity is to write about dyads. Your previous novels have often focused on a couple flanked by friends. Intermezzo features two brothers flanked by lovers. Readers of novels about couples know that the couple will encounter certain predictable narrative and communicative obstacles. Will they or won’t they make it work? Can they come to understand each other? But the shape that a story about brothers takes is less clear, unless, that is, you’re particularly enamored of the Cain and Abel story. How does the sibling dyad open different possibilities for relationality in the novel?
ROONEY
Throughout my work, rather than writing about characters, I write about dynamics. I always find it funny when people say “That’s an interesting character,” or “That’s a good character,” because I don’t think a character has any intrinsic value. Every person is intrinsically interesting, but in a novel, what gives a character power is their relation to others, and how those relations change.
The textual lineage of the novel fascinates me, but when I sit down with my Word document, it would be a lie to say I’m thinking about it. What I’m thinking about is, I’ve got this guy, and he has a brother. I want to know how their relationship grew and changed through their childhoods. I want to know what sort of pressures it exerted on them. Did one of them feel in the other’s shadow? Did they resent each other? Did they really love each other? Did the younger brother idolize the elder? I fell in love with these characters. Every novel I have written has been that process of falling in love with these totally fictitious individuals, and, in that way, their relationships become the plot.
INTERVIEWER
We expect lovers to not speak the same language from the get-go. We expect for there to be misunderstandings between them. But siblings tend to think, at least when they’re younger, that there exists a communicative ease and a stability between them that will persist. One of the things I find interesting about Intermezzo is how it relates the communicative problems of the couple-form to those that emerge between siblings as they grow up.
ROONEY
I love communicative problems. They always introduce just enough friction for me to feel drawn into a scene, when there’s some slippage between what somebody is trying to say, or feels capable of saying, and what the other person wants to hear or is capable of hearing.
It’s interesting that you say that with lovers there’s an expectation of miscommunication, but with siblings there’s an expectation of knowledge, because you had a childhood together. I think people often have fixed roles within family dynamics. I don’t mean that people become entrapped—it’s not necessarily a negative thing—but, for instance, the younger sibling will always be the younger sibling. For me, it was interesting to think about how those dynamics change when the younger sibling, who has always been the baby, and is indeed ten years younger than his only, elder sibling, is now an adult himself. How can he conceive of himself as an adult within their family unit? How much space can his brother make for him to be an adult in his own right? It felt like this was a family unit where people had labeled themselves and one another in relation to one another, and they weren’t seeing the parts of one another, or even of themselves, that didn’t fit within those roles. Maybe an analogous process goes on between lovers or between best friends, but with families, the dynamic is set from such an early age that it becomes even harder to break out of.
INTERVIEWER
Remind me, are you a middle child?
ROONEY
Yes, I am a middle child.
INTERVIEWER
That felt to me, an eldest child, like a very middle-child answer. You say you don’t want to use the word entrapped, but you do use that word in Intermezzo. Your characters are entrapped in particular ways of being. What frees them from their roles is the rearrangement of the family form and the many forms of grief that result—grief for the loss of their father, grief for the life they have lived, perhaps badly, grief for the life they can never live, grief for the life that other people will never be able to live. As I was reading the novel, I realized I don’t fully understand what grief is. Is it a steady feeling, like sadness? Or is it a way of perceiving the past, relative to the present, as irretrievable? How did you think of it as you were writing?
ROONEY
Everything you’re describing felt like the very questions I was working through in the book. Families get stuck in certain roles, but what becomes possible when one of those roles is suddenly absent—in this case, because of the death of a family member? There’s some guilt and discomfort in realizing that new family formations are possible because this beloved person is no longer there, and the space their absence leaves—maybe you don’t want to fill it? I was asking myself those questions as the author, but I was asking them alongside the characters, because they are grappling with them too.
In the case of the elder brother, Peter, he is also grieving for a life he didn’t get to live. When he was in his twenties, a very significant event changed the trajectory of his relationship with his then partner and changed the life they both had planned to live. There’s a sense in which he hasn’t— I hesitate to say he hasn’t dealt with those feelings, because who can ever deal with feelings? I don’t even know what that means. But those feelings are there, and the loss of his father prompts him to spiral—to experience a mad, spiraling regret. He cannot believe that time keeps passing, and this is the one life he has on this earth. There’s a rueful quality to his grief. For his younger brother, it’s different, because he’s lost a parent at a much younger age, before he feels that a lot of life’s doors have closed behind him. He’s moving into his adulthood—that’s a different kind of grieving process. He feels shocked to realize his father will never know him as an adult man.
INTERVIEWER
You don’t have to regret the events of your life to grieve the passage of time. I often feel as if I want more life—not a different life, just more of what I have. It feels greedy or spoiled. I don’t know if grief is the right word to describe that, but it does seem like one thing the novel lets us do is to imagine more lives for ourselves.
ROONEY
I’m hesitant to get into my own psychology, but I’m aware that for me, writing novels is a way of preventing or being in denial about the passing of time. The years I spent on this book passed, and I can never have them back, but I do have the book. It’s like I’ve stored that time in a jar, like it can never quite get away from me, because it’s in there. There is a sense of pouring life into the novels and feeling like I get to live the lives of my characters. It does give me a doorway out of the world where time passes, as it does for all of us, into a world where I get to control the passing of time. The chronology of the book runs from about September to December of a single year, and when I was writing it—it took me about three years to write—I often got confused about what time of year it was in real life. I would be in October with my characters, but it was actually May.
I wonder if it’s common to other writers—something a little bit frantic about wanting to preserve life, not to let that get away and not to have nothing to show for it, not to have spent three years and have no evidence that I had ideas and experiences. I forget I live in a world where I do not dictate the speed at which time passes—it passes in the normal way for everyone.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps there’s something more normal about trying to control your time than about accepting the time kept by the industrialized world? It reminds me of a scene in Intermezzo where Ivan goes to his mother’s house, and his mother’s husband and his children are intolerable to Ivan, in part because of what they buy and how they work—that is, how they spend their time. As he’s leaving the house, he thinks there’s nothing wrong with him, that he is the normal one, and that people who are well suited to this world are the deeply abnormal, maladjusted ones.
ROONEY
I used the word normal in the title of a book. I wish I hadn’t. It’s like I’ve lost it from my lexicon, which is a shame, because it’s a word I use quite a lot and—why do I use it so often? Because I am interested in what’s considered normal. That’s something that comes up in Intermezzo, in the sense that there are social relationships and intimate relationships that don’t fit comfortably into categories that we would consider socially normal. The desire to be normal places demands on us that can often feel intolerable. To many of the characters in novels, those demands do feel unbearably intense.
At the same time, normality is a way of belonging to a particular community, in a particular place and time. That’s something my characters care about, and something I care about too—being in a place with particular people, the same people, and seeing them often, and being accustomed to one another, living in community with others. I value it highly, but it comes with a normative principle. How do you balance the desire to belong, to be part of a community that makes life meaningful, and the desire to resist the constant drive to normalize relations?
INTERVIEWER
One way to strike the balance comes to us through games. Ivan plays chess. Peter is a barrister. Both play highly formalized games with rigid rules, with clear winners and losers. Your epigraph, from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, made me pay attention to how all your characters talk about playing games, many of which are less clear-cut. They especially play what Wittgenstein called language-games, self-consciously testing the use of language and the actions into which it is woven—especially, for your characters, the action of desiring or feeling desired. I am thinking of Ivan wondering what it means when people say someone is “a nice woman,” and of Margaret’s comically involved reflection on her use of the word passionate when she speaks to Ivan. I’m thinking, too, of how many ways there are for your characters to say “Fuck” or to mean “I love you.” There’s a thorough metabolism in this novel of ordinary language philosophy, which feels new to your work. Where did it come from?
ROONEY
I always hit obstacles at some point in writing a novel. It can be rough, and I got near the end of this one and didn’t know how the book ended. I was writing and rewriting and rewriting loads of scenes that didn’t really feel right, and then, for some reason, I started reading what you call the ordinary language philosophers. I read some J. L. Austin and Margaret MacDonald and made my way to the later work of Wittgenstein. I ended up reading Philosophical Investigations, and I felt, after I read it, that I knew how to finish Intermezzo.
When I closed the book, I thought, I get what I’m trying to do now. My characters were playing language-games and trying to figure out the rules of one another’s language-games all the way through the novel. My reading of Investigations helped me to see that more clearly, or to pursue that more passionately. It gave me a new way of thinking about language that is grounded in relationality. When you say something, there has to be someone you’re saying it to. Otherwise, it has no meaning. Language gains meaning from the person who is uttering it and the person who is receiving that utterance. To ground language back down in relational dynamics was fascinating to me. That’s what I have been interested in, from my first book through to this one—the essence of things in their relation to other things, not in the thing itself.
INTERVIEWER
There are many moments in Intermezzo when characters carefully reflect on what they’re saying—not only their words, but also their tone, gestures, eye contact, and the time and place in which they’re speaking. Did reading Philosophical Investigations make you think differently about how you structured dialogue between your characters, or what the stakes of dialogue could be?
ROONEY
Yes, and one of the other interesting things about Philosophical Investigations is that Wittgenstein uses a lot of fictitious dialogue in it. Often, he makes a point, and then he introduces a fictitious quote from someone who disagrees with him. Then he will explain back to that person why he was right in the first place, sometimes getting exasperated with the person, even though he invented them. That’s what I do. I make up fake people to get mad at all the time.
The interplay of dialogue in Wittgenstein works toward a philosophical end, and I wondered, How could I do that to a novelistic end? My characters do get exasperated with one another, and sometimes it’s because they are playing different games. One character thinks they are engaged in a certain kind of conversation. The other character attributes a different significance to what that character is saying, because they have misunderstood the game that’s being played, or they are trying to play a different one.
INTERVIEWER
The moment when two people “win” a language-game is a moment of mutual understanding. Like game, mutual is a word and idea that repeats throughout Intermezzo. Henry James often uses that term to indicate the moment when subjectivity transforms into intersubjectivity, consciousness into shared consciousness—or, as you put it in Intermezzo, when two people’s “thoughts interpenetrate.” Mutuality fascinates me because it’s a form of thought that doesn’t prescribe the content of thought. People can be mutually attracted and mutually contemptuous. Mutual understanding can lead to sex. It can lead to estrangement. What kind of function does mutuality play in your novel?
ROONEY
Much of Peter and Ivan’s lives have been structured by the sense that it is possible to win at life, and if they just try harder, someone’s going to give them a gold medal and say, “You are the champion.” That drive has been destructive and also, in some instances, has given them the will to live. Mutuality complicates that paradigm. Instead of there being a winner and a loser in an interaction, the only way to win is when the other person wins too. Victory can only be shared. If you don’t share it, nobody wins.
Mutuality sits uncomfortably with both Ivan and Peter. They have to adjust themselves to the idea that it’s possible to find mutual ground. For both, it’s easier to do with women. They are more open to finding mutuality when it’s colored by an erotic and romantic sensibility. When it comes to trying to find mutuality with each other, they struggle, and sometimes the mutuality they find is violent rage. They find they have mutual contempt and hatred for each other, and, as you say, that’s a form of mutuality too. It’s not an exclusively positive thing. Ivan becomes aware early on in his relationship with Margaret that he’s no longer playing a chess game where he’s trying to defeat his opponent. It’s a different kind of game altogether.
INTERVIEWER
Maybe it’s easier to find a positive mutuality in their romantic relationships with women because sex doesn’t require language. The moments of high eroticism in the novel are often described as moments of “animal intelligence” or “deep animal contentment.” I found the most attractive character in the novel to be Alexei, the whippet, in whose presence I felt the same contentment that Ivan feels with Margaret. What is the role of animal intelligence in the world of language-games?
ROONEY
When we first meet Ivan, he’s thinking about the relationship between mind and body, and he thinks, “It’s great having a mind, but to have a body? You just drag it around everywhere, it’s this sack, and it’s awful.” For Ivan, there’s this sense that he is his mind, and that his body is an unfortunate fact of his presence in the world. Throughout the novel, that becomes more complicated for him. Partly it’s complicated by the erotic, because he becomes involved in an intensely passionate and caring sexual relationship, which forces him to acknowledge that having a body has its benefits, and that those aren’t neatly separable from the pleasures of the mind. The sense of selfhood is equally animated by the body, just as it is animated by consciousness, or what we would think of as sentience.
The mind-body problem is interesting for me, because when I’m writing my novels, I feel like I am a floating brain. I forget that I physically exist. I’m a Word document. It can be a shock for me to catch sight of my own reflection—not that I’m shocked at what I look like, but that I look like anything at all. It’s strange to exist while I think I’m floating in the ether with these characters.
I think that my interest in this problem also explains the recurrence of the animal. I didn’t realize I had done this until now, but at one point Naomi says, “Men are dogs”—but the dog is the nicest character in the novel! He supplies a—I was going to say “wordlessness,” but in a novel, nothing can be wordless. He is an artifact composed entirely of words, but as a dog he cannot verbalize. I wanted to capture the feeling of purely physical sensations or purely physical interchanges, like staring into a dog’s eyes, or being with an animal in silence. How do you, as a novelist, capture that, when you only have recourse to language? That’s an interesting philosophical challenge, as well as a technical one.
INTERVIEWER
Going back to Wittgenstein, part II of Philosophical Investigations begins by wondering whether, if a dog can’t speak, it can feel hope.
ROONEY
Yes, and “Can a dog lie?” is another question he asks. A lot of the characters in Intermezzo do tell lies, as many people in the weave of our lives do. But a dog can’t, as Ludwig so wisely tells us. The dog becomes a beacon of pure honesty, which isn’t always pure kindness. Sometimes your dog wanders away when you need comfort most. Dogs don’t just provide love and care—there’s something else, animated by an inability to be dishonest. A dog is always honest, and that was an interesting presence on the page compared to my dishonest human characters.
INTERVIEWER
Your novels sometimes get classified as romances, in the modern sense of commercial romance. But the idea of the language-game linked up for me with an older idea of magical romance, one in which people who are not well suited for their world, usually a medieval world, utter a particular combination of words in a particular order, and suddenly their world changes. It is a distinctly religious or spiritual approach to the power of the word. Is there a difference for you between the transformations that art offers and the transcendence that religion promises?
ROONEY
Growing up in Ireland in the nineties, I had a Catholic education. I attended Catholic primary school and secondary school. So much of my very earliest world formation—and my ideas about how to read and what books were, and what stories were—was deeply steeped in Christian ideas, and specifically Catholic ideas. Even if I wished to, it would be hard for me to untangle completely my idea of storytelling, or even the pursuit of artistic beauty, from the idea of God and the divine.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you feel you should?
ROONEY
Part of the reason is because I am extremely critical of the fact that the Irish education system is still so institutionally religious. I think that is inappropriate for a contemporary state. There’s a sense in which, in critiquing that system, I want to critique how intertwined those ideas were in my upbringing and education. But it would be dishonest to say I have really wanted to or tried to tear apart the interstitching between the pursuit of beauty and an idea of transcendence that might be called divine or religious. I think the experience of art leaves a residue that goes beyond what can be captured in ideological critical terms. What is that residue, then? You can call it magic. Or you can talk about it in specifically religious terms, and many writers do.
I’m interested in the absence that has been left in our textual lineage by the disappearance of religious practice. Of course, when we talk about narrative forms that preceded the novel, like the courtly romance Le morte d’Arthur, which I loved very deeply, this whole textual lineage was produced around the central organizing principle of the figure of God. Once that figure has become absence, which for many of us it has, that absence becomes sociologically, politically, and aesthetically interesting. Before, the pursuit of beauty was narrated to us in terms of godliness. What is that pursuit now? Is it just adornment? If so, it feels pointless. I have to tell myself it is something more than that.
I think that’s part of why my books return to the idea of religion, because of my interest in those absences, but also because I want to explore what feels like the transcendent power of beauty to change our lives. That was the motivating question behind Beautiful World, Where Are You—the title sums it up. I have spoken about my ideological commitments—how I look at the contemporary world through a Marxist lens and through the lens of climate change, and how I feel like we’re heading for a catastrophe that is driven by our consumerist lifestyle. It also creates this extremely visually barren, soulless, lifeless culture. What I would like to develop is an aesthetics of anti-consumerism, an aesthetics that is against buying and that can resist the extreme weight of the capitalist content-production mill. I want to play whatever tiny, grain-of-sand role I can in developing that aesthetic program, in making something beautiful that says no to consumerism, disposability, endless growth, and that is consonant with a political project, even if it’s not in itself political.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think Christianity can be rehabilitated but not capitalism?
ROONEY
The reason I don’t think capitalism can be rehabilitated is because we have only one planet to live on, and we are running out of the resources that power the capitalist system. We cannot keep plundering the earth. In the Marxist tradition, which wasn’t originally an ecological intellectual tradition, there are other good reasons why I don’t think the capitalist system is sustainable as a way of organizing human activity.
Can Christianity be rehabilitated? It is important to be, and I am, very critical of institutionalized religion. It’s not at all that I want to rehabilitate the tattered image of Christian institutions. But I do think religious faith—and not just Christian religious faith—involves traditions of immense intellectual and philosophical richness. There’s a beauty to those lineages that still has a lot to give the novelist and the many, many people for whom religion is a central part of life. I don’t think we have finished learning the lessons that religious traditions can teach us, even as we always try to bear our critical faculties in mind.
INTERVIEWER
I like the idea of describing you as a writer of ordinary-language Christian romance. I like that genre distinction more than some of the other categories that are used to describe your work —a writer of millennial novels, for instance, or a writer of autofiction, which is a wholly specious category, but one that people seem attached to. They’re also attached to the idea that your life—and not the imaginative life you described, but a kind of literal accounting of your life—is in these novels. I’m perplexed by that desire, because I think it does evince some kind of powerful yearning for a recalibration of the relationship between fiction and reality. What’s it about?
ROONEY
What is it about? I do ask myself that, because people believe or want to believe that my books are drawn from my life. It makes me think, How busy do you think I am? To me it feels silly, but when I protest and say, “My books are completely fictional, and I don’t draw from real life,” I get a laugh from the audience, as if they think I’m joking. Many of the writers whose work really excites me—writers like Sheila Heti or Ben Lerner or Annie Ernaux—are working in what you might call autofiction. Their work challenges the boundary between fiction and memoir or essay. The extent to which the narrator is drawn from the persona of the author is part of the troubling and seductive experience of reading those works. And the fingerprints of those books are there in my work.
But I think some people don’t believe you can come up with fictional characters, because it’s such a weird thing to do. It would be more normal if I just wrote about things that happened to me, because it’s conceivable why a human being would want to write about troubling experiences—as a form of catharsis, for instance—and then market it as a novel. That seems like a more plausible psychological process than when I say, “I was sitting on the train one day and I just thought, What if a chess player played a simultaneous exhibition game in a rural arts center, and then the woman who worked there began a love affair with him?” That doesn’t seem like something that would happen to someone, and even if it did, you wouldn’t then spend three years fleshing out every aspect of their lives. People probably want to believe I’m not as weird as I would need to be to have written the books I have written. But I am that weird.
I also think—and I hope this doesn’t sound like self-flattery—that sometimes when you read a book where the characters feel real, you think, Well, maybe they are. That’s a lovely compliment to a book, to think that the characters have come alive as much for the reader as they have for me. That’s my whole ambition. When I feel full of life, full of this fictitious life that doesn’t happen in our world, but in a world very close at hand, I want to be able to bring that to somebody who picks the book up, even if it’s just one person.
Merve Emre is the director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
