Transcript: Culture Chat — ‘Intermezzo’ and the Sally Rooney phenomenon

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture Chat — ‘Intermezzo’ and the Sally Rooney phenomenon’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and this is our Friday chat show.

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Today we are talking about maybe the most anticipated novel of the year, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. This is the infamous Sally Rooney, author of Conversations with Friends and Normal People, often called the first great millennial novelist. And Intermezzo is her fourth novel.

Here’s the plot in a nutshell: two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, living in Dublin. Their father has just died. The older brother, Peter, is a handsome lawyer in his early 30s who’s stuck in this love triangle between two women. One of them is hot and the other one is smart. The younger brother, Ivan, is a socially awkward chess savant in his early 20s, and he’s fallen in love with an older woman, Margaret, who’s 36.

The book’s release this past Tuesday was like adult Harry Potter. There have been midnight bookstore parties and rapturous critics and endless buzz. And so today we’re going to talk about it. I’m Lilah, and I’m spending my boyfriend’s money on eyelash extensions and ketamine. Joining me from London, her boyfriend’s just out of uni and she’s a little embarrassed about his braces. It’s our brilliant deputy books editor who specialises in fiction, the great Laura Battle. Hi, Laura. Welcome. 

Laura Battle
Hi, Lilah. Hi. Great to be here. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Also in London, this is a special guest. Longtime listeners will know her as the original founder of the FT’s culture podcast many years ago. She and I were co-hosts through the depths of the pandemic. It’s the FT’s magazine commissioning editor and my good friend Griselda Murray Brown. Hi, Gris. 

Griselda Murray Brown
Hi. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
So good to have you. 

Griselda Murray Brown
I was excited to hear which Sally Rooney line I got and I don’t get one. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, Here. I have one for you. She’s on a mission to save her dead dad’s thirsty dog from her evil mother’s new family. It’s Griselda Murray Brown. 

Griselda Murray Brown
Hi, Lilah. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m so happy to have you both. OK, so first of all, I’m with two Sally Rooney experts. You’ve both written about her. Gris, you’ve interviewed her back in 2018. I’m curious, top line, where are you coming to this book from and what did you think? Laura? 

Laura Battle
Yes, I have read all her previous novels and I completely loved the first two. And I also loved the Normal People TV adaptation. And then the third novel, I just, I didn’t quite get. I find it rather dry and emotionless. That is Beautiful World, Where Are You. And so I sort of started to think, well, is this just a case of diminishing returns with Sally Rooney? I also, I have to say, I find the whole publicity circus around — this is a kind of jaded books editor talking here — this sort of publicity circus around a new Sally Rooney, slightly wearying. The advance proof copies get sent out to a select few people like Wonka tickets or something. And then there’s the whole, you know, all the merch on the day that, these T-shirts and the tote bags and all the rest of it. So all this is to say that I didn’t pick this up and primed to enjoy it, but I mean, I was just totally won over by it. So, yes, a big, big thumbs up from me. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
I love that. What about you, Gris? 

Griselda Murray Brown
Yeah. Sally Rooney fan. And I think actually, like you, Laura, I loved the first two books. I didn’t love the third one. And this really does feel like a return to form. It’s really emotionally involving and really absorbing. And it feels like to me it felt like a more, I think, a more kind of emotionally open novel than perhaps her first two, which were quite sort of tightly written and quite economical with their language. This felt, I mean, it’s a big novel. It’s 450 pages. It’s kind of, it is sort of bigger and blousier in a way. But I really loved that about it. Yeah, it completely won me over. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally. I have what feels like too strong an opinion about this. And I’m curious what you both think. But basically, I come to this book as like a millennial woman who reads contemporary fiction. So this kind of target audience. I learned about Sally Rooney, I think from you, Gris. I read both books. I watched that horny Normal People TV show during Covid like everybody else. And I always thought of her books as very good and very readable, but kind of economical and kind of cold. But this book I found a lot warmer and more earnest, and I really liked that. And it made it maybe my favourite of her books. You know, my kind of unfair gripe about a lot of contemporary Irish novels is that they’re very beautiful in the details. They notice every detail. But often they’re kind of frustrating to me because there’s so much thinking and so little talking. Like the plot hinges on people just not saying the one thing they feel. And then when they’re ready to say it, it’s like too late. You know, you hold your feelings in and then you die. And I felt that way about Normal People. But this book, there’s a lot of thinking and there’s a lot of talking. And I just found it weirdly earnest and sweet, and people were open in it. And I appreciated those scenes where people were having it out. And that made me like it. 

Laura Battle
I think it would be wrong to say that her books are sort of emotionless, but there’s definitely a rigour to her use of language, and I think that’s really deliberate. And actually, I think you can see that it’s almost like a generational trend, I think.

Griselda Murray Brown
Sort of flat prose.

Laura Battle
Yeah. I mean, a lot of people criticise it, I think, for being sort of so measured and you get a sense even in this book I think, of her wariness around language about how we use language and the challenges of using language. But you really get a sense of her wariness about it and her, you know, almost frightened of language’s power, I think. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Did you feel that way, though, in this one, too? Did you feel it was different in this one? 

Laura Battle
Yeah, I think it was much the overall effect, as you said, is warmer. Part of that is you’re feeling so close to the characters. I mean, really feeling that you are the characters. But I still think she’s very careful in the way that she writes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Careful. Totally.

Griselda Murray Brown
I think she’s careful, but I think she’s not joyless, though. I think the thing about Sally Rooney is the characters do talk a lot. I don’t think it’s that they don’t have conversations. I mean, Conversations with Friends is all about these like, hyper-articulate millennials, but they’re sort of people who know a lot and think a lot and yet kind of haven’t yet experienced much or at least don’t know what to make of their experience. I felt with Intermezzo that it felt like a kind of older book in the sense that these are characters who have kind of made a try of things and they’ve had a lot of disappointments and they’ve had to kind of pick themselves up or not after that. And it’s sort of, what do you do when things don’t work out? 

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Let’s get deeper into the book. This is a novel that, as we’ve sort of talked about a little bit, really focuses in close on its characters, like you’re really in their heads. And Sally Rooney is famous for kind of getting under the skin of her characters, right? Like when you’re done with the book, it feels like they’re like, alive out there somewhere, still completing their lives. And so maybe we start there. I’m curious how the characters felt to you. Like, did you like them? Did you believe them? Gris, what did you think? 

Griselda Murray Brown
Like them is a difficult one because of the way she writes, you don’t dislike them, like no one is a baddie because the book is way too kind of generous and empathetic for that, I think. And yet, at the same time, they’re incredibly frustrating, often because of this lack of kind of knowing what’s right for them. They’re sort of like stumbling through life. And you’re saying like, no, don’t do it. Don’t go with her or whatever. But they’re going to do it anyway because they’re stupid. I guess it’s frustrating in the same way that, you know, real people are frustrating and . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, for sure. 

Griselda Murray Brown
 . . . you know, I think I felt quite sort of almost like — not motherly, that’s a wrong word — but like an older sister to Ivan, the 22-year-old, because he really, you know, the book opens with him wearing a bad suit at his father’s funeral. And it’s just such a kind of, it’s quite funny, but also such a sad sort of poignant image of him standing kind of alone by the table of uneaten sandwiches at the sort of wake after the funeral. And no one’s talking to him. And he’s so socially ill at ease. 

Lilah Raptopoulos 
This is Ivan. This sort of socially awkward chess genius. 

Griselda Murray Brown
Yes, exactly. Yeah. And Peter, who’s this kind of smooth-talking barrister, his elder brother, by 10 years, has just given the eulogy. And I think Ivan feels he was the one who was closer to his father. He really misses him in a really kind of shocking way. And so you’re immediately on his side. That’s the first scene in the book. I mean, essentially the plots in Sally Rooney are like, will they, won’t they? And you’re just sort of following a couple or two couples and you’re like, are they gonna have sex? Are they gonna get together? Are they gonna realise they do actually really love each other? And it’s not she doesn’t write complicated plots, but the sort of emotional drive and the fact that these characters feel very real and you are reaching for them. And you have a lot of empathy for them. That’s what kind of keeps you reading. I think you want to know what happens in the end.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I also think the little things somehow when she writes about them, you realise like, maybe this actually is an underexplored dynamic. Like watching the relationship between that younger brother Ivan and his older brother Peter, at that younger-and-older-sibling, like, 10-years-apart dynamic of, you know, that’s really visceral and brilliant to me. Yeah, just the sort of like Peter talks down to Ivan with this kind of, like, superiority. And Ivan reverts to a kid brother and yells back, you treat me like a child. And I don’t know. I mean, as a younger sibling . . . (Laughter)

Griselda Murray Brown
I wasn’t gonna say anything, Lilah.

Laura Battle
But it is interesting, isn’t it, because you don’t quite afford your siblings like full humanity. You see them as either like, the older witch or whatever, or the younger like, spoilt brat. And it’s quite cartoony and unfair. And that whole adjustment that everybody has to make when they reach adulthood, which is a sort of never a fixed date anyway, but is, is sort of exaggerated in this case because of the really big 10-year gap. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, absolutely. 

Laura Battle
I mean, Sally Rooney’s previously been, I think, associated with, you know, the angst experienced by young women. People have written that up as her great, great focus. So I really enjoyed her writing about getting inside the minds of two men, sort of, they’re both extremely well-rounded and kind of vivid. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
So I want to ask both of you about the sort of atmosphere of the book. I found when I was reading it, like she’s writing about such little things and often such existential things that suddenly you feel like every move in your life is literary. Like I felt this week like I was living in a novel and like, I noticed what I was wearing and how I was pouring a glass of water and how my partner kissed me when he got home. And it was like everything was sort of like vivid. And I also felt when I was reading, like, there were these visceral moments that sort of stay with you. Like there was a scene of two characters in a bathtub and there is a scene of two characters that are eating a pizza and something about like the tub and the steam and the water or the pizza box and there, you know, the garlic dip. It was just they’re all just orbiting around these objects. And I don’t know, I found all of that sort of like tangible. 

Griselda Murray Brown
I’m interested in you describing how it makes you sort of think about your own life. And it sounds like when you were describing like pouring a glass of water, it’s almost quite, it’s quite filmic, isn’t it? And it’s interesting that Sally Rooney’s books do seem to adapt to screen really well. And she sets the scene. She tells you what people are wearing. She tells you the kind of quality of the material they’re wearing, of the objects in the room. These seem to signify something. I wonder if there’s something quite millennial about that, it’s not . . . It’s, obviously, visual description is not uniquely millennial but I wonder if paying attention to kind of beautiful things and like, the sort of the luxuriousness of the observation almost.

Laura Battle
Yeah. And then those things are very tangible, aren’t they? In previous novels, you are much more aware of the sort of online life and how that intersected with real life. And obviously in this one as well, it’s seamless. You know, you get the text messages, WhatsApp messages. But I felt that was less of a focus and actually there’s this more description of tangible. I mean I really noticed, being a journalist, the number of times that her characters are reading actual newspapers. There are lots of references to the (inaudible) of the newspaper (inaudible), but that was quite striking. And there are musical references throughout, aren’t there? I mean, again, they’re almost all classical. There’s no reference to pop or dance music, I think. And the title itself is a, you know, classical music reference.  

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s, some would say, very insufferable. 

Laura Battle
Some of the criticisms that’s been levelled at Rooney is that she basically just a clever clogs and people don’t like that. And I sense with this novel there was a real defiance, actually. You know, it’s about a chess prodigy and a human rights lawyer. And at the end, there are three pages of notes of all these, you know, references to lines from Shakespeare and James Joyce and Susan Sontag. Yeah. And I felt it’s almost like she’s saying, you know, yes, this is an intellectual novel. And what’s wrong with that?

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s funny. It’s funny, Gris, that you’re saying it is a millennial novel. And as you were talking about that, like the idea that every object is tangible and that like actually most of what we’re scrolling through, like, we’re a very visual culture. 

Griselda Murray Brown
Yeah. We spend a whole time photographing beautiful things in our houses and presenting them to each other and try to kind of curate this version of life and like, you know, a Sally Rooney book on a coffee table is like totally part of that. She’s kind of winking at that little bit. But I do . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Then on other hand, what you’re saying is that also she’s like, you know, call me the millennial writer, but also I like, I’m going to have these high-brow interests that millennials might find insufferable. I might be old-fashioned in the way that I was into music or the way that I read newspapers. 

Laura Battle
A lot of it is rooted in tradition, you know, whether that’s the tradition of the 19th-century novel, which she’s spoken about, or in the modernist tradition, you know, you immediately think of James Joyce and Ulysses in her descriptions . . . around Dublin. She’s often described as being a radical writer, but actually there’s a lot that’s really embedded in traditions in this book. 

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Lilah Raptopoulos
I’d love to ask you both for the last part of our conversation a little bit more about this sort of like cult of Sally Rooney and this idea that she’s the millennial voice and the fact that she’s become the shorthand and what that means about like what we expect from her. I guess to start, I will say that like, I like Sally Rooney and I’ve listened to a few interviews with her and I think she’s like earnestly making art. And I think that art is doing a special thing for a lot of people. And I feel sort of like we’re doing her or ourselves or someone a disservice to like, make her such a huge deal in a weird way. Like, I felt that I really had to put that out of my head when I read this book just to see how I liked the book. But then there’s some reason that she’s a really big deal. And I guess, I don’t know. I wonder what you both think about that. 

Laura Battle
I think a lot of it’s out of her control. And I really agree with you that I just had to clear my mind. And actually, I think a measure of the book’s success was that I was able to, you know, you weren’t, you didn’t have the cult of Sally Rooney looming over you. I didn’t find, reading this book, you know, it felt completely fresh. But at the same time, you know, what we were saying about this being a really serious book, you know, beautifully written book. Ultimately, it’s got to be a good thing that lots of people want to read it. You know, that’s got to be good.

Griselda Murray Brown
I think one of the things that’s almost like so obvious that we don’t say is that also these are very romantic books. I mean, these are books about love and kind of people’s lives being shaped by love and changed by love. There is also something very kind of, I think, essentially quite hopeful and optimistic about the books. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
And romantic. 

Griselda Murray Brown
Very romantic. Love changes people. Also, she writes sex very well. I do think we underestimate that. There are a lot of sex in her books. But, you know, it’s never just kind of gratuitous like pornography. It’s kind of sex that really develops character. It’s people who can’t say how they feel, but somehow they can express it through sex. And so they’re sort of like, drawn together in this quite animalistic way. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Can I ask, what do you both, what do you think is the actual thing that people are projecting on to her? 

Griselda Murray Brown
I wonder if part of the thing about being a voice of a generation is that you’re having to answer a huge question, you know, kind of who are millennials? What do they care about? What is this generation? And I suppose the thing about millennials is we love to define ourselves. You know, we kind of, we are the first generation that grew up curating our online selves, kind of presenting ourselves to the world, both to kind of the workplace, but in our social lives, to our families. And so we’re sort of obsessed with knowing who we are and defining ourselves too, in a way that I think makes older generations, probably quite rightly, a bit fed up because it’s kind of navel-gazing and quite silly, but maybe comes from a real place of uncertainty. And then when a novelist or any kind of artist is given this badge of like, here is someone who’s going to explain us to ourselves, that becomes quite freighted, people bring a lot to her. They sort of read her books almost hoping to kind of understand their own lives maybe, or their own generation or our own moments of these people who came of age in a recession, kind of graduated with no hopes. Our lives have been kind of completely upended by social media, which we didn’t have when we were children, but we, some we had from kind of young adulthood. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
But also many of us are very educated. 

Griselda Murray Brown
Yeah. And we’re kind of too educated for the jobs that are available. So you get this kind of weird mismatch of like people going through school and university thinking like, you know, you can be what you want to be. Like, you just need to work hard and you can achieve it. And then you come out into the world, into the economy and you think, oh OK, well, you know, no one will go to the bottom of the pile and make cups of tea for free kind of thing.

Laura Battle
I wonder if there’s also . . . I mean, she’s generally quite reticent, but it is widely known that she holds Marxist views, she’s obviously has strong views about the economy and politics. And so I think people expect her to distil the whole socio-economic political landscape as it is experienced by the millennial generations. And these have turned to her as if she can sum everything up in another novel form.

Griselda Murray Brown
It’s so true. We know more about her views on politics and other things, even though she’s reticent than we do for other novelists. You know, I mean, I think there’s only really a handful of novelists that kind of are also asked to write op-eds about Gaza, for example. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Related to that, just as you know, as we’re reaching the end, I feel like because she’s an outspoken Marxist and her politics are very open and we expect her to explain ourselves to ourselves. People are often pretty disappointed with the amount of politics that shows up in her books. Elif Batuman has a newsletter, and I read in her newsletter recently something interesting. She said that in Sally Rooney’s novel, she’s disappointed that she isn’t more radical than she is, that the characters aren’t more radical than they are. I’m curious if you felt that in this book, like if you expect her work to be more radical, or if you think that that’s sort of an unfair expectation. 

Griselda Murray Brown
I understand what people mean when they say that because these are actually quite traditional novels. They often end quite happily, or at least on a kind of optimistic note. These are not like nihilistic visions of a society that is just kind of crumbled to dust. And so I guess if you’re coming to this wanting something radical and wanting Marxism and wanting like a vision of a different way of living, that’s kind of not what you get really in Sally Rooney. And for me, I don’t mind that because I’m not coming to these novels with that expectation, and I actually think that’s an unrealistic expectation. In a way, she’s not actually a very radical novelist. I don’t think she’s quite . . . although she’s writing about contemporary life, that doesn’t mean that what she’s doing is kind of highly experimental or even really on the kind of cutting edge of that.

Laura Battle
I think novels, if they’re going to last, they can’t be too closely tied to the intricacies of the politics of that very day. This is set more than a year with that moment. And I think there are many other outlets, there are other opportunities to express. Go write political commentaries much more directly. They don’t have to always be in her novels.

Griselda Murray Brown
No. And actually, that is kind of a death of a novel yet to be a sort of political vehicle. There’s nothing worse than going to see a play and then it kind of dawning on you as you sit there that actually the playwright just wants to hang you over the head with a kind of thesis about the radical idea. And you think, oh no, I just wanted to watch some people, their life.

Laura Battle
And completely disrupts and derails everything else about it.

Griselda Murray Brown
Yeah, I don’t think that’s what art is for, really. I mean, you’re right, Laura. That’s what op-eds are for.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Gris and Laura, thank you so much. We will be back in just a moment for More or Less. 

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome back for More or Less, where each guest says one thing they want to see more of or less of in culture. Laura, let’s start with you. What do you have? 

Laura Battle
I would like to see more Tracey Emin. We ran an interview with her in the FT last week because she’s got a new exhibition of paintings and sculptures at the White Cube gallery, which I have yet to see. But I’ve always admired her as an artist and particularly her drawings. But from the interview that our outgoing arts editor Jan Dalley did, Tracey talks about her cancer and the really life-changing surgery that she’s had to have. You’re just really struck by her remarkable energy and drive and the sort of ambition that she still has. So more Tracey.  

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, please. OK. And Tracey Emin, for anyone who doesn’t know, badass.

Laura Battle
Right? Yeah. One of the most famous of the young British artists who burst on to the scene in the mid-’90s with sensational works of art, most famously “My Bed”. I think what it’s called, “My Bed”. Tracey Emin’s bed, which sort of lives on in the public consciousness. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Gris, what about you? 

Griselda Murray Brown
Well, apologies to both of you, because my More or Less is very much not a cultural hot tip, but it’s more of a petty gripe. But I would like . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
And great, we love that. 

Griselda Murray Brown
I would like less WhatsApp communication in general and in particular large WhatsApp groups that are not groups of friends. What I mean is the kind of large groups you find yourself in when you join a community like a school or a nursery.

Laura Battle
Oh my God, I’m with you on this.

Griselda Murray Brown
I have a class WhatsApp, I have a nursery WhatsApp, I have a street WhatsApp. I have a WhatsApp for all, like, community gardens I’ve somehow found myself in. And as well as just being too much communication to keep up with, this strange, somehow passive-aggressive tone to some of it. And this kind of strange arguments can break out over like PE kit, when I’m sure people wouldn’t talk to each other like that if they were, you know, speaking to each other at the school gates or wherever it might be. But somehow, on the form of a large WhatsApp group, people can really behave badly. And I want less of that. It’s bad energy I don’t want in my life. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mine is a more. I want more like, well-made, not reality television about home renovation. Like I want The Bear . . . (Laughter) but for contractors and architects and builders and like roof guys. 

Griselda Murray Brown
That’s an idea. Lilah, do you happen to be doing up a house at the moment? Can I just ask?

Lilah Raptopoulos
I don’t know if you’ve noticed for some reason this is now interesting to me now. Yeah. My partner and I bought a home and we’re doing work on it. And I’ve learned that there’s this ecosystem of guys in New York and some of them are women, but you have to call them the guys. There’s the window guys and the basement flood guys and the tile guys and the chimney guys. And it’s just a world that I love. It’s ripe for story and I want it represented within real art. I don’t just want it represented in like, love it or leave it house show or whatever. That’s what I want. 

Griselda Murray Brown
I’m not sure that’s . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
The people want it. The people want it. Gris and Laura, this was really such a delight. So thoughtful. And thank you so much for being on the show. 

Laura Battle
Thanks so much for having me. 

Griselda Murray Brown
Thank you, Lilah. 

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. As usual, I recommend you check out the show notes. We have links there to everything mentioned today, including Gris’s interview with Sally Rooney. Also in the show notes are places you can be in touch with me, like my email and my Instagram @lilahrap where I post a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff about the show.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s our excellent team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again on Monday.