Its opening lines, per her British publisher, Faber Books: “Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.”
When Rooney published her debut, “Conversations With Friends,” at age 26, she was instantly anointed the voice of her generation. Each new book — “Normal People,” longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018; “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” released in 2021 — has been greeted as a major event. (One recent publicity campaign, featuring not only the industry-standard tote bags but also bucket hats and a themed coffee cart, has even been nominated for an award.)
The intense anticipation does have a sharper edge: “For each splashy profile of the 30-year-old writer that has preceded publication, there is an equally pointed critique of her earnest mediocrity or the whiteness of her imagination,” Bilal Qureshi noted in his Washington Post review of that third novel.
Rooney identifies as a Marxist, which has invited many critics to mine her fiction for its ideological content. The typical Rooney protagonist — slender, bookish — is often working through their leftist political commitments along with their romantic ones. The characters fret about allowing trivial matters of the heart to take up any mental space at all; it means “we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e., everything,” one character writes to a friend.
In 2021, Rooney drew controversy when, in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, she refused to sell translation rights to “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” to an Israel-based publisher. Though she said it would be an “honor” to have the book translated into Hebrew, the novelist also said in an email to the New York Times that “I simply do not feel it would be right for me under the present circumstances to accept a new contract with an Israeli company that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the U.N.-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
The characters and their relationships in “Intermezzo” have become “an important part of my life,” Rooney said in a statement to the Associated Press. “I hope that I’ve done them some justice in writing the book, and that they might find a place in the lives of readers too.”
