Peter and Ivan grieve the recent loss of their father. Never close, they struggle to avoid estrangement while navigating their very different lives. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother.
Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Rooney has achieved a neat trick: She is considered the trendiest of novelists, though she writes in a traditional comic form. Her characters are distinct individuals whose names and actions are easy to recall, even years after reading the books.
In Intermezzo , Rooney brilliantly and hypnotically creates a universe parallel to the worlds she has created in three previous novels. To discount the recurrence of certain themes and characterizations across her novels as unoriginal is to overlook the profundity of this novel. Tender and true. Intermezzo propels you to its well-earned, moving climax with nary a false move.
