Dear Ellen F.,
[Dear friends—ear mountaineers?—I wrote the majority of this letter before the election, and without feeling that including the ominousness of its looming would fit. After November 5th I wondered if I should scrap this, restart it, or try to wrangle the experience of seeing Trump win again into the piece, but ultimately I decided not to; I couldn’t see a way to squeeze it in here without it feeling gratuitous. So… this is not about that at all!]
On a Tuesday earlier this fall, after a day of teaching, I made my way to Third Place, our neighborhood bookstore. Third Place is a ten-minute walk from our house, and it’s an especially valuable hangout because it also features a coffee bar and an excellent beer place/bottle shop, which serves (average) burgers and fries and tots (probably also average, but an average fry or tot is pretty excellent when hot and dipped in a condiment, in my opinion). I was going there to meet my friend Anneka, who I think you maybe met long ago. We’d had a miscommunication and needed to sort things out, and how better than over tots? But I also had an ulterior motive, disclosed to Anneka in advance, for picking Third Place in particular: it was September 24, the day Sally Rooney’s new book came out, and I needed to buy it!
Anneka and I figured things out and, after our tots and a walk in the hills around the bookstore, we went back inside to pee before departing. I’d already bought Intermezzo while waiting for her to arrive, partly out of paranoia that it would sell out. But—as I’d known from the start—Third Place was also hosting a Rooney release party that night, one of many happening at bookstores across the country. And so when we went back in, the foyer of the café was filled with Sally Rooney swag: chessboard pins and popsicle sticks topped with glued-on pictures of Paul Mescal, Intermezzo Baggu totes and big yellow signs with the book’s title in all caps. We started laughing out of some combination of delight and shock, and momentarily forgot about our bathroom mission. Anneka took a picture of me in front of one of the signs, and as she snapped it, I realized that Spencer, the events manager at Third Place, who I know because he interviewed Andrew at The Bachelor’s paperback release there, was in the background. We talked to him for a little bit as he scurried around doing setup, and he gifted me a dog- or child-sized Intermezzo bandanna—which Hans would never tolerate, but which, still laughing with Anneka, I tied around my neck in the bathroom to take a selfie.
I tell you all this both because I want to write to you, a fellow known Rooney fan, about the experience of reading Intermezzo, which can’t help but be shaded some by the hype around the book, but also because, as is probably evident from this tale—and despite my slight too-cool-for-school attitude about the bookstore party, which kept me from attending it as an official participant—the release of the novel was a genuine joy for me! It was on my calendar for months, one of an ever-scrolling series of small things I like to anticipate even if in the end they might disappoint me. (Other examples include any Taylor Swift drops, the monthly rotation of flavors at local ice cream places, Charli XCX’s remix album… it’s mostly pop culture and food.)
This kind of low-stakes but high-octane anticipation has become a major feature of my life, and maybe it always has been; I have a reputation in my family for having basically always wanted to save presents gifted on a birthday or holiday for later so that I could stretch out the knowledge that they were waiting for me. But I think it’s been playing a bigger and more complicated role as of late because 2024 has felt like a rough year for me, and when things feel like they’re not going well, I lean ever-harder on these kinds of incidental bright spots. Mostly I think that’s for the good! I cannot discount the endless delight brought to me by brat and the “Apple” dance, for instance. But I also spent a good deal of this past summer thinking about whether I was experiencing a “spiritual sickness” characterized by more longing for things than actual enjoyment of them. I think it’s great to have stuff to look forward to, obviously, but sometimes I also feel like when my anticipated events arrive, I’m less able to actually sit still and feel them, and am more inclined to wonder about the next good thing. One way of describing this is just as anxiety, albeit maybe the more optimistic side of it; another, and I’m not sure if you and Blake are familiar with the enneagram, would be that I am a 6 (the “loyal skeptic”) with a 7 wing, and 7’s are “the enthusiast”—but part of the trouble 7s can get into is that they sometimes can’t stop chasing more good things. And that quality, which is certainly present in me, is maybe part of what I’ve been identifying as my spiritual sickness, because I feel some sort of compulsiveness around pursuing versus savoring (the latter is a word my therapist likes to deploy, and an aspirational state for me for sure). The feeling I had in the bookstore, and walking the quiet route home in the dark with Rooney’s novel in my backpack, was fully future-oriented; there was a part of me that couldn’t wait to start reading, but also a part that was already thinking about being done with the book, being able to evaluate and discuss it, and wondering what I would read next.
(Note to you, Ellen, and to all readers: Intermezzo spoilers are to follow!)
I started it that night. And I should say too—part of what was/is funny about my excitement is that I was also primed to potentially dislike this book, because I was decidedly not a fan of Beautiful World, Where Are You. And, too, I had read the excerpt that appeared in the New Yorker this summer, which is a condensed version of the second chapter, and had been bored by it! I can see that priming looking back at my Intermezzo annotations, because in the first 20 pages or so there are several censorious “eh”s in the margin, my shorthand for distaste for a sentence or passage. I was feeling suspicious that it was going to be more of the same stuff I hadn’t been as wild about in her last couple novels: cold third person, heterosexual longing between a depressed man and a sharp woman who secretly wants to be dominated (okay, that last one is in all of them).
But Intermezzo is, for all my fears, and even given some of the ways it does in fact line up with Rooney’s inexorably repetitive plotting, pretty different from everything that’s come before in her oeuvre, and I could see that right from the start. All the chapters from the perspective of Peter, the elder of the two brothers we follow, are written in a fragmented style; the book opens with one of these, and I was immediately reminded of Ulysses and other modernist classics—not the usual Rooney comparisons! There’s lots of loveliness and surprise that comes through in these sections and their musical scattered phrases:
Sylvia, he says. No, wait until it’s quieter. Yes? Nearly there now anyway and could make it sound more casual at the door. Would you mind—I don’t know. Can I sleep on your couch? I won’t—No, no, Jesus, don’t say it: I won’t touch you. Don’t. I’m just kind of— Her hand gentle tender on his arm, not moving, still, still. All quiet and stillness gathered at the point of her merciful touch. Of course, she says. No problem. Don’t say it. I’m in love with her. You, if only.
There are also definitely occasional hiccups in the style for me, spots where it doesn’t really land.
But I felt excited to see a big shift, and I also think it’s a particularly interesting one because, as multiple other people with whom I’ve been chatting about Intermezzo have said, it slows you down some, which runs counter to the general—and pleasurable!—propulsiveness of Rooney’s prose. The book (as maybe you know—I’m curious if you will have read it by the time this letter drops! I suspect you will have…) also has plenty of that propulsiveness, though: it alternates between these denser Peter-centric sections and more conventionally-Rooney chapters that focus on Ivan, Peter’s younger brother, and Ivan’s love interest Margaret. Gone, thankfully, is the weirdly soulless third-person of Beautiful World, Where Are You; all the writing in here is close-third, and the combination of interpersonal drama and emotional anguish, all also signature Rooney to me, is ratcheted up via that perspective. When I got to the chapter I hadn’t liked in the New Yorker, I found, mysteriously, that I DID like it in context (and perhaps in contrast with the more dense and erudite Peter voice, though I actually like Peter’s chapters even more that the Ivan/Margaret ones overall—possibly an unpopular opinion).
Things sailed from there! I read a lot of the book over the next few days: on the lightrail to and from work, one of my favorite reading spots; on the couch with Andrew and Hans in the evenings; and, perhaps most notably, during a SIBO test, in nine precisely-timed 20-minute chunks alternating with repeatedly breathing into a bag and stabbing a needle attached to that bag into a series of rubber-topped test tubes. (I’ve been having stomach problems all year, which is part of why it’s been a rough one for me. My SIBO test was negative, but it was a great excuse to read a lot!) I finished Intermezzo a little over a week after it came out, and was, to my delight, behind several friends on that front—as is generally true for me re: Sally Rooney, a big part of the joy was the fact that the book was being talked about, written about, and that from various corners of my life, people were texting me updates about their reading experiences.
Because I’ve spent much of the last few years thinking a lot about Rooney’s work, I couldn’t help comparing Intermezzo to her other books in a way that likely isn’t the case for everyone’s reading of it, though I don’t necessarily want to presume—part of her work’s charm is how it stays in people’s minds! So maybe lots of other people ARE comparing. In any case, I’ll get my bigger complaints out of the way first: it does baffle me how frequently tropes and character traits recycle in her novels, so that one can, as the hosts of the Critics at Large podcast from the New Yorker do on their recent Rooney episode, play “Rooneyverse bingo” for qualities that are likely to turn up in any given book. (Some examples include “age gap relationship,” “debates about Marxism,” and “rampant, almost willful miscommunication.”) All writers have favorite themes, and I remember Noy, whom you know, telling one of my classes in grad school that many great writers wrote about the same few things for their entire career—and I remember too that I found this idea a tremendous relief when she said it, and still do. And/but, I will say that to me it is a bit much that in three of Rooney’s four books, a dog is used, to my mind at least, as a prop to signify that a man is tender and caring even when he might appear otherwise (somehow Connell from Normal People escapes having a dog in the mix, at least in my memory… maybe he’s already sensitive and caring enough?); it’s also weird to have a protagonist faint as a prelude to an epiphany in 50% of your published work. I don’t quite understand the draw towards this kind of plot-based repetition, and it gives certain moments in the book a flatness for me. And, too, there is the much-discussed preoccupation with small/thin women who want to be dominated in bed… which is less present in here to some extent, but is still around, and which honestly I just find boring at this point!
Those are my quibbles, but as I said earlier, they started to fade out as I got deeper into the book—or maybe they didn’t even fade out, but something larger and more important to me overtook them. Rooney, for all her characters’ irony, is a sincere writer, or a writer deeply interested in sincerity, and as I read more and more of Intermezzo I felt myself falling into a kind of reading that has been accessible to me since childhood, but is rare, and which I’ve felt with the books I’ve loved most as an adult. Because there is, on Rooney’s part, a genuine and obvious care for her characters, as fucked up and (as many people say about the people in all her novels) annoying as they might sometimes be, and because the book contains nuanced dialogue, lots of interiority and also lots of interpersonal tension, I too cared a lot about Peter and Ivan and Margaret and Naomi and Sylvia. I cared more and more as I read until I was, in that childhood-vortex way, reading with the kind of absorption and concern that one might feel while thinking about a dear friend who’s not doing well, or while listening to someone you love tell you about a hard time they’ve just been through.
This wholehearted focus was especially present for me in reading the last 100 or so pages of the novel. Peter has, for all of the book, been mired in a depression prompted both by his father’s death and by—what, loneliness? the drudgery of work, of getting older, of things not actually getting “better and better and better,” as a hypnotherapy app I tried for my stomach woes likes to say, as we age? He believes that he’s successfully hidden this from everyone around him. But in the last part of Intermezzo his composure starts dissolving under pressure, and after getting into conflicts with every single person he’s close to, he begins to despair enough to seem close to acting on the suicidal thoughts he’s had off and on for the duration of the book.
There’s a terrible propulsiveness to his series of bad decisions (that kind of emotional rubbernecking is, we can’t discount, something we read for too), but I think more than that I am drawn to the way in which his despair is met by something else—not a cure or a resolution, but just care, or love. Despite Peter’s conviction that he is “[u]nwelcome, unwanted anywhere, unloved,” people show up for him—Naomi and Sylvia, his two love interests; his mother, who’s been a vaguely menacing presence all through the story; Ivan too, in the end.
The way Rooney depicts this is beautiful and moving in a way that’s hard to fully articulate—as I finished the book I burst out crying on our couch, as I have done with other novels I really love: The Waves, The Portrait of a Lady, Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries. It was the kind of crying that stems from overwhelming emotion but also awe—awe at what writing can do and also at the intensity of feeling itself. Jo Hamya, a writer whose book Three Rooms I also really like, reviewed Intermezzo for the Independent, and wrote:
On finishing, I reflected: what would it be to hold a book with a soul? I felt I had. I felt changed, and utterly the same…felt, that for the time spent reading Intermezzo, I had gone more deeply into the world, reattuned to its networked thrum of pleasures, miseries, worries, and erotics that I might already have been aware of—but dully.
I felt for a day or so after finishing Rooney’s book the aftershocks of my awe, my own version of what Hamya says above. I too felt changed, as dramatic as that sounds, and as much as some skittery aversive part of me wants to avoid saying that about a Sally Rooney novel. But I did feel it. And the part of me that had been deeply touched by the book felt connected in interesting and complicated ways to the part of me that has been suffering from my “spiritual sickness.” There is a throughline in Intermezzo that threads across characters: a sense that overwhelm and pain are the results of having your life entangled with others’, but that that pain is matched with, or overmatched by, some inseparable overlapping value. In Peter’s words:
Proliferation of inappropriate attachments. Holding hard, harder, clutching, not letting go. Well, if that’s suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.
And in Margaret’s: “More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.”
I may be experiencing a bit of a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon with this set of ideas, because after reading Intermezzo I’ve been seeing them in all sorts of other things I’ve been reading. I just finished a great YA novel by Jandy Nelson (someone whose work I stumbled upon by happenstance in Northampton’s Forbes Library, and whose books are all extremely good—I’ve cried at the end of a couple of them, too, including this most recent one, which is called When the World Tips Over), and I startled at the following line from it and its similarity to the one from Margaret’s POV above: “More world, I remember thinking. More and more and then some more world.” A little later on, the same character in Nelson’s novel writes in her journal:
There is never enough chocolate, oysters, peaches, figs, filets cooked a perfect medium rare, picnics by rivers, sky, flowers, wine, kisses, love, time. There is never enough life in life. Open the cupboards. Rip open the bags. Reach your hand in for another. Walk into the forest at midnight, splash around in moonlight. Find the people who plant the sun in your chest. Seek platters of words, jugs of bright paint, whole days made of music. Kiss for weeks at a time, kiss everyone you know. I see you and you and you and you—life-thieves like me—trying to stuff more in your pockets, your mouths, your hearts during these measly lives that will be forgotten.
And then in Elisa Gabbert’s essay collection Every Person is the Only Self, in an essay called “Weird Time in Frankenstein,” during a discussion of Sarah Manguso’s published/curated journal Ongoingness, Gabbert says this: “Manguso, for her part, is finally able to take solace in forgetting: as time piles up, she loses access to specific moments, but begins to accept that life is ongoing, not discrete but continuous. It’s more and more and more until it’s over.”
One of the things that I couldn’t stop thinking about re: these quotes as they piled up for me is the way all of them represent moreness, if I can coin that term for the purposes of this letter, as a very mixed bag! Moreness is “more complex, more difficult”; it’s a way of trying to fill oneself up during “these measly lives that will be forgotten,” it’s linked to losing track of specifics, and it’s “more and more and more until it’s over.” There’s another line, too, late in Intermezzo, that spatializes the simultaneous preciousness and discomfort of moreness. It’s from Peter’s perspective: “What can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking.”
This preoccupation running through my reading was interesting to me in large part because of how this ambiguity both squares and runs somewhat counter to my emotional experiences this year. As I said towards the start of this letter, part of my malaise has been a feeling that I am too obsessed with the idea of having more. I’ve seen this most acutely in a realm admittedly quite far from the one that Rooney is exploring: it’s shown up for me in having to change my relationship to the category of food I will broadly call “treats” (the obvious stuff like cookies, slices of cake, ice cream, and of course there are myriad amazing options for all of these in Seattle—and, as mentioned above, a lot of them rotate their flavors every month, escalating the constant sense of new potential specialness—but also craft beers, amaro from our favorite amaro bar, fancy cheeses, and my beloved coffee) because of my stomach issues. Taking away many of those treats or reducing their frequency has created a disturbingly large vacuum of joy in my life, and pretty quickly it became apparent that the gaping hole was not only, maybe not even primarily, about the present-tense moment of enjoying whatever special bougie thing I had obtained. It was also about the knowledge that at all times more treats were coming, and that I could anticipate them with security: yes, I will get to have something else good later. It’s embarrassing to even try to explain how sad it made me to no longer be constantly anticipating these small pleasures; it felt crushing in a way that came with significant self-judgement. I talked with my therapist, and with Andrew too, about how in reality there were still way too many things for me to enjoy for that capacity to be exhausted: even just in the food world, there was high-end olive oil, artisan bread, halvah, stone fruit (maybe not the best for me but I ate it all summer anyway); beyond that there were great songs (“Take My Hand,” an early Charli underrated gem, for instance!), startling views on walks, fierce spells of reading, nonstop laughing at my friends’ cute kids. And those things are amazing! But I’m still not able to stop wanting a wider field of options; just yesterday, for instance, I went back to Third Place, the bookstore/bar where I got my miniature Intermezzo bandanna, and sat there to eat popcorn while reading—and the whole time I was there, 30% of my brain was occupied with whether or not I should get a four-ounce beer, which I knew I should not because of how my body felt, but which my mind really wanted. This eroded some of the pleasure of my salty popcorn and Henry James, and I left there feeling soured (well, that is only half the case; I was cranky about this waste of mental energy and the way it shifted my attention, but then Andrew came with Hans to find me there, and Hans’s maniacal joyous greeting, wildeyed and kissy, reset me significantly back towards happiness).
As I’ve already said, I recognize that a) this frustrated impulse is different than at least what Rooney’s “more and more” is about exactly—hers has perhaps less to do with the material/spiritual avariciousness that I’m describing than with a kind of overwhelm of emotion; and b) that there is also a significant difference between, say, Peter and Ivan’s father dying and my inability to have a beer or cup of coffee whenever I want one (or ever, really). The connection between them has something to do with the desire for guarantees when you can’t ever have them, I think. And I bring that connection up as another dimension of the question that all those quotes fuel for me, or the question I’ve felt in myself for much of this year: Do I want more, or do I want less?
That question has been vibrating through seemingly all elements of my life. It’s present in some of what I’ve mentioned above, but I’ve also been thinking about it a lot on the level of time and activity. I am in a situation that is, in most ways, very happy: I feel like every day of my life in Seattle either is or could be (but usually just is) very full. There are lots of things I like to do and try to make time for regularly (riding my bike, reading, watching movies with Andrew, going to the climbing gym, glacially slow writing); there are myriad daily activities and jobs and chores for me as for us all (teaching is, as you well know, kind of a full-time-plus scenario, and then there are things like walking Hans, cooking, and all the maintenance work we all do to keep our lives in order); we also live a life here in Seattle that is awash in good friends, a gift obviously, and in intriguing events, so that, if I had the stamina and inclination, I could find something to do outside of the house every evening. There is a part of me, related to the “treats part,” and probably also influenced by my parents, who both have an intense tendency towards being ceaselessly active, that wants to snap up all these opportunities and to fill all hours of all days with good stuff, or meaningful stuff, or even just the chores that, when completed, give me some sense of mild pride or satisfaction. But what I have been noticing as of late is that if there’s too much stuff on my schedule, which there often is, everything—even the good parts—takes on a tinge of obligation, and then often I am not having fun, or feeling satisfied, simply because I am overfull, scheduling-wise and stimulation-wise.
(I’m aware too that I am saying this to you, a parent, in a way that might seem laughable re: the comparative openness of my schedule! But more on that in a second.)
All this is to say that, as I read Intermezzo, it was interesting to find myself responding with such an emotional pull towards the quotes about how excess feeling, experience, etc. are the source of meaning, because I do think, in a general way, I’ve been urging myself towards less rather than more: fewer treats, fewer things on the schedule, less longing for the next delight. But I think part of what the book made me realize (and maybe this is super obvious, and it just took me many months/many words to come to it!) is that more and less are not absolute or zero-sum in one’s life. What I think I have been wanting, or desperately scrabbling for, when I say I want less, is actually just the feeling of presentness: rather than wondering about next treats, I’d like to have a treat and enjoy it fully, and rather than an empty schedule, I just want to have enough energy to fully appreciate my friends, the movie, the book, whoever or whatever I’m alongside. And I think that presentness is in a way what Peter and Ivan and all the rest are gesturing at when, by way of Rooney’s narration, they think about their “[p]roliferation of inappropriate attachments” and decide that, inappropriate or not, they will hold onto them. Emotion makes us present, in part because emotions are always changing, shifting shapes, and passing through us, if we are attentive enough and there enough to feel them. So maybe it’s not a question of moreness or lessness, but presence. I want to be there, which is being here, and here, and here.
It strikes me too, as I write this all out, that the tradeoff for that presentness, whether in terms of joys or some of the painful moments of interconnectedness that Rooney so (pleasurably!) explores, is uncertainty. To be fully receptive to a moment or a situation (or a situationship, if you are Peter or Ivan or their sweethearts) is to consent to not knowing what’s coming next. This is the cause of so much of the Intermezzo crew’s anguish. I see it especially in Peter’s resistance to the possibility of a nontraditional setup with Naomi and Sylvia, which is a next step that lacks the prefab trajectory of traditional heterosexual couples, but it is also a part of Ivan and Margaret’s love, and even of Peter and Ivan’s relationship as brothers, which requires breaking down old roles and making something new. And, too—and this is the link I was earlier searching for between my own more banal experiences and Rooney’s people’s more serious ones—for me, in my present scenario, to accept less planning ahead re: treats and re: fun social things is also a road to more presentness. All of these situations involve relinquishing certainty… which is just so rough! But it feels like I have been craving the attendant rewards, the lessening of longing and the moreness of immediate feeling, desperately as of late.
Before I close (and with the caveat, too, that what I just came to is not a moral or credo, but its own version of a “here”—it is where I’m landing now), I wanted to share one more constellatory source re: the thinking I have been doing in here alongside Rooney and others, one that maybe will be of interest to you. A few months back Ezra Klein did an interview with Jia Tolentino (his second one, I think). It’s ostensibly focused on a New Yorker article Tolentino wrote about the kids’ show CoComelon (which I have never seen, but I could not stop LOLing at the clip about beans included in the podcast) but it’s actually a much more wide-ranging conversation, and pretty early on, in a discussion of screen time for both kids and adults, Tolentino says something that I thought about a lot afterwards:
I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but I have this sort of symptom of this brain disease that’s particularly troubling to me. Like, pre-kids, back when I had enough alone time to have original thoughts more than once every five months or something, I would think something. And I would have this sense of, this is an idea that is shimmering with movement in some way, you know? And then it would be too much for me. And then I would be like, I can’t. I can’t deal with it. I’m going to write it down, and then I’m going to scroll for five minutes. Like, I would very frequently have that response. And that terrified me even though I kept having it.
And it sometimes feels to me not that we’re turning away from the mess and the wonder of real physical experience, despite the fact that it’s precious—I kind of feel something within me sometimes that it’s too precious. It’s too much—that being present is work, in a way, that it’s this rawness, and it’s this mutability. It requires this of us, and a presence. That is something that I have sometimes found myself flexing away from because of all the reasons that it’s good, in a weird way.
This is a beautiful description of moreness, presentness, intensity—and the interesting, frustrating part of us that, to use words from a Robert Creeley poem that, come to think of it, I also quoted in my Ear Mountain to Blake years back, “wants to/turn away, endlessly/to turn away” when faced with an expanse of feeling. (The lines in Creeley’s poem are referring to our tendency to do this with love!) And one thing Tolentino talks a lot about in the episode is how having kids is a way of turning towards the present moment even when it’s boring or hard; in an admirably optimistic and casual way that the parent-friends in my life loved, she says that this presentness across feelings is a kind of pleasure for her. Later on in the podcast she says, “Maybe this is helping me understand how I delineate good pleasure, meaningful pleasure, from meaningless pleasure, which is that I think there’s friction in all real pleasure and in the kind of pleasure you learn to get in the real world. There’s friction in it. There’s true surprise.”
I am not a parent, nor do I, at this moment, think I ever will be, but this idea of friction and surprise as a part of pleasure resonated for me, and looking at it now I see its affinity with the Intermezzo quotes I pulled out, too. One fact of living is simply the existence of other people, whether our kid, our partner, our friends, our colleagues, our students, constantly in motion and flux, coexisting and colliding with us, all their attendant fleeting desires scraping up against our own. I wonder if you feel this friction in your day-to-day with Louisa (who I can’t wait to meet), and where it feels transcendent, and where it is hardest.
It was so good to see you and Blake in our yard in August, Ellen, with Hans whimpering endlessly from inside the house—thank you for reaching out, and for being the kind of friend from the past who is also still present. I want to know your thoughts on Intermezzo, too—send ‘em my way!
your pal,
Liza
P.S. While getting ready to send this letter out, I started reading a (great so far!) book by Heather Cass White called Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life, and was shocked and excited to find, in the chapter called “Play,” some thoughts that link reading itself to questions of presentness and certainty/uncertainty! A big part of the chapter uses the psychoanalytic thinker/writer Christopher Bollas (a favorite of my mentor Geoff Sanborn, too!) and his ideas to think about how books can be objects through which we “open doors to unconsciously intense—and rich—experience in which we articulate the self that we are through the elaborating character of our response” (those words are Bollas’s, not White’s). White connects this to the concept of play, and in so doing touches on the Creeley-like reluctance to engage with big feelings:
At the same time, [James] Carse’s vision of play, “to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself,” is an ideal, one few of us can always live up to, because, like the “jouissance” of the “true self” as Bollas imagines it, it may involve suffering. It is guaranteed to be exhausting. Playing means choosing to lay down “that weapon, self-protectiveness,” and it is rare to be drawn readily to being unprotected. For one thing, it precludes the possibility of feeling like a winner. Winning needs finished games and it needs losers; its signs are titles, property, and power… Play is unsettled, unfinished, in motion. While we are in play, we are equal with all other players, all decisions are still in abeyance, all outcomes possible. When such uncertainty feels unbearable there are many ways to foreclose it… Seen in this light, the choice by readers no longer to read is an expression of a positive wish to remain composed and fixed.
White is talking about reading here, but some of this really makes me think about Peter (and Ivan too!), such high achievers both, and the preoccupation with winning versus a sense of being “unsettled, unfinished, in motion” in one’s life more broadly.
The contrast to this “positive wish to remain composed and fixed” in White's chapter is the present-tense excitement of reading, which she describes as meaning-making on two levels:
Part of reading is accretive, language building up in the mind to form the book we draw from the pages before us and subsequently carry within us. But another part of reading (the basis of the accretive part) lives only in the present, is a transient experience that exists only in the now and now and now as we do it. Love of that impossible-to-hold experience is why readers also tend to be habitual rereaders. We read in part to find out what happens, but even more so to be part, over and over again, and never twice exactly in the same way, of its happening.
The “now and now and now” echoes the “more and more and more” of Rooney/Nelson/Gabbert; I felt such intense delight at this connection!
P.P.S. Some other assorted hot takes on Intermezzo that didn’t fit into the rest of this letter:
I am TRULY shocked that, given the timing of this book, no one wrote a thinkpiece about how “Naomi is brat.” For many weeks after reading Intermezzo, I googled that phrase to see if anyone had! It’s maybe my own equivalent of fanfic that I pictured Naomi as Charli XCX, though I know the age is off. (Anneka said she pictured her too, though!) The song “Mean Girls” felt like it was made for Naomi!
I was extremely charmed by Ivan in general, and especially loved his way of speaking. I wish more people said “I get you.”
And yes, Rooney is just great at dialogue in general! I thought about this exchange between Peter and Naomi often after finishing the book and LOLed multiple times: “Watching him get dressed for work the other day she said from bed: Honestly, very dilf-coded. Alright, he replied, I changed my mind, I’m taking you back to jail.”
I read/heard some criticism that mentioned the women in the book being flat characters in comparison to Peter and Ivan, and I do think there’s some truth in that—I especially feel it with Margaret, which is interesting because she’s also the only one whose perspective we occupy. The backstory with her ex-husband wasn’t super compelling for me. But Naomi and Sylvia, despite the kind of teetering possibility of them falling into a virgin/whore dichotomy, are both pretty lively. And despite knowing it to be clichéd for me in particular, I do really love Sylvia, and her relationship with Peter. There are so many moments in their interactions that I found moving. Here is just one:
He too was laughing then. The inexchangable pleasure of her conversation. Just to walk the streets saying things, anything, just the act itself, walking together at the same speed, and talking, purely to amuse and please one another, for no further accomplishment, no higher purpose, to let their words rise and disperse forever in the dark brackish air.
(This reminded me, too, of the line in Conversations with Friends from which I poached my Rooney project’s title, in which Frances says about Nick, “He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music.”)
Okay, actually, one more moment from Peter and Sylvia’s exchanges that hinges with the CwF quote I just mentioned, also so simple but gorgeous to me: “She sees him, starts to smile, waiting for him to cross. That feeling, he thinks: all he has wanted, all his life. To walk towards her, to reach her, to accept from her extended hand the warm paper cup of coffee.”
The ending, as I said, really got to me. The last paragraph is beautiful, I think, and I keep remembering the lines towards the end of it as I work on this letter, as I read, as I ask all my questions of myself and walk Hans and do my chores: “Picture them all there together. To imagine also is life: the life that is only imagined. Clatter of saucepans, steam from the kettle. Even to think about it is to live. Hard cold wind blowing in from the sea, blowing his coat back, raising white hackles on the river. Nothing is fixed.”
Even to think about it is to live (!!!).
