Why is it that when a writer is tasked with putting chess to paper, they feel compelled to personify the game with hidden ley lines? As if a mysterious force imbues its moves with a deeper meaning: the soft, subtle bishop move to G7 is actually the player’s internalised trauma, the loss of the father figure manifesting itself within the game. The long diagonal? Simple. It represents their future in clear sight, the rest of their life perfectly spanned out in front of their eyes. Any opening line is unknown by the opponent, met with a drawn-out ahhh, as they see which trap they have fallen into. All checks are surprises, even at a top level. A checkmate comes completely unforeseen: the hidden dagger I see before me.
It seems impossible to depict chess as simply chess. The bishop to G7 is called a fianchetto. You place it on the long diagonal because it gives bishops maximum scope, making it more useful than a knight in an endgame. Why can’t a well-known opening just be a well-known opening? Theory is theory. Lines are learned.
Of course, creative personification is useful, and chess shouldn’t be off-limits to a clever metaphor — but it seems as if all writers of chess fall into these traps. Even my favourite, Nabokov, trips himself up in his early novel The Luzhin Defence, where all on-board difficulties are reflections of the protagonist’s woes, and each genius play arises from some deep emotional epiphany. Maybe it’s facetious to suggest that chess can’t have dramatisation, but to me, it stems from the common misconception that chess is a game of strategy. Chess is not a game of strategy. Strategy involves making conscious decisions between two equally good moves for deliberate reasons, based on the future state of the board. But chess is 99.9% pattern recognition and playing the best moves. There might be six players right now who can play chess with strategy: Carlsen, Caruana, Nepomniachtchi, Liren, Nakamura, and Pragg. For the rest of us mortals, it’s simply about playing the best moves in descending order.
Sally Rooney is no exception but, to her credit, she doesn’t dwell on the mystery of the board too much. In Intermezzo, Ivan is a 22-year old loner chess player who meets Margaret, a mid-thirties divorcee looking for the reset button. His brother Peter, also in his mid-thirties, is doing a bad job at balancing a love triangle between his sexy 20-year old college girlfriend, Naomi, and his university sweetheart, Sylvia, who holds the real key to his heart.
I really do cherish how much Rooney can extrapolate the smallest interaction and spin it a dozen times, going further and further, showing all its angles. Margaret can see the way Ivan talks about his dog and realise, through his giddiness, that beneath his nervous shell he’s just a boy disguised as an adult — and, much to her difficulty, she loves him even more for it. Or how Peter, in all his attempts to fill the void in his life — through sex, drugs, alcohol, career success, family fallouts — will always return to his first love, his safety net, whether he’s conscious of it or not.
At the same time, there’s a crux to this book that just felt trite to me. For a book so modern — its lack of dialogue tags blending thoughts and speech into a continuous stream, indiscernible in structure from the rest — the central gimmick, the age gap, feels outdated. Is a 22-year old dating a 36-year old really that scandalous? Maybe if Rooney painted in more external pressures, we could see these interior doubts resonate a bit more. But the only pushback is an off-handed comment by his brother, who’s in the same situation as he is. When the entire structure of the book resolves around this dynamic, that they are all lovers which society will outcast once made public, the pay-offs and denouement fall a bit flat once they are resolved with the same implausibility as its setup.
Rooney’s at her best when these overarching conflicts aren’t being tackled. When the two leads are chewing their scenery, navigating their daily duels with an overwhelming Dublin. Peter’s chapters are calculated. Being a lawyer, he takes all his observations to their logical endpoints, but when his answers aren’t fulfilled and his critical reasoning proves useless, the only thing he can do is collapse inwards. By contrast, Ivan is emotionally immature, and the obvious social signs bypass him with particular dramatic irony. There’s strength in the details. Back-and-forth chapters between both brothers prove effective when immediately answering each other’s questions as she flips the perspective each time. Peter looks down on Ivan, quickly followed by a chapter where Ivan’s shown spreading his wings, trying to be an adult. Then he gruffly feels jealous of Peter’s composure and security, who is then revealed to be crumbling from the inside out.
It pays homage to the great Dublin works that preceded it. Rooney even annotates her inspired quotes in the endnotes, which I found particularly cute. You wouldn’t catch Eliot or Joyce being quite so humble. Peter’s booze-trips or Xanax-reveries feel reminiscent of a certain Mr Dedalus. As a callback, I think there’s something to be said for connecting the Modernists’ formidable cities — their information overload, confrontation with death, existential crises, and philosophical breakdowns at the start of the 20th century — and today’s internet era. Where navigating the complexities of relationships mirrors Ulysses‘ daily odysseys, that a journey into the city is a journey into yourself, that we experience love as wanderers.
There’s a lot of ideas at play. A typical anti-capitalist message is sandwiched between a richly sensual sex scene and a nod to Joyce or Wittgenstein. But I’m not sure Rooney balances all these aspects well enough; large chunks of the book feel like musing for the sake of musing. Ripping apart the fibres of every social conversation, the diction and breath of every word, the variations on what the other person could be thinking right now – these offer poignant meditations at times, but they’re few and far between.
Hunting Bears 
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