How This Style Works: Peter's Troubled Interiors in Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Published in 2024, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo follows two brothers grieving their dad as they navigate unconventional romantic relationships, offering, among other things, a pretty striking workshop on how writers can use sentence craft to enhance characterization.

Twenty-two-year-old Ivan, a chess prodigy, was closer to his dad than Peter, a thirty-three-year-old lawyer. Mourning, Ivan hooks up with Margaret, a thirty-eight-year-old divorcee, while Peter tries to balance his newish relationship with Naomi, a girl who happens to be Ivan’s age, and his old one with Sylvia, an ex from Peter’s own peer group. Yes, age is a thing.

With three third-person-limited points of view—Ivan’s, Peter’s, and Margaret’s—Rooney uses sentence aesthetics to distinguish Peter’s interior, offsetting it from the others in a way most readers will immediately sense if not formally recognize.

Although Ivan is far more outwardly awkward, his thoughts, barring one critical bit of self-acquitting omission, are generally clear and well organized, which tracks for a chess player. Margaret is also a largely coherent thinker (we don’t get points of view from the women in Peter’s life, possibly because he’s pretty into himself).

Peter, meanwhile, is a smooth talker, especially relative to Ivan, but he’s also a heavy drinker who pops a lot of Xanax to manage both his grief over his dad and his pre-existing angst and alienation. His thoughts, correspondingly, are a mess, like this cascade here:

Along the corridor, scent of cleaning fluid, overheard voices. Even medicated he feels it: the white light of his own righteousness. Clear luminous certainty. In the courtroom, flow of speech unhurried, precise, inexorable. Admitting no contradiction. Familiar command almost perfect, yes, and pleasurable even, and then over.

This is Peter feeling pretty chuffed about himself as a pill kicks in, before which he wasn’t feeling quite so chuffed. These lines come after a series of similarly deconstructed thoughts and before a litany of the same, but we can linger here to examine what Rooney does to conventional sentence structure when she’s depicting Peter’s inner state, which you might think of as predicate smashing, with some subject paring to boot.

Note that there’s only one standard sentence (i.e., “Even medicated he feels it . . .”). That’s the only riff with a full subject and predicate. All the others are fragments, and reconstructing one will help us better understand how they work:

In the courtroom, [his] flow of speech [is] unhurried, precise, [and] inexorable.

With the possessive pronoun, linking verb, and conjunction restored, respectively, we have something a lot more recognizable. It starts with an adverbial riff (i.e., “in the courtroom”), moves on to the subject (i.e., “his flow of speech”), presents the linking verb that establishes a predicate adjective (i.e., “is”), and then concludes with a list of subject complements (i.e., “unhurried, precise, and inexorable”).

With those key elements removed, we get an adverbial with no verb to modify, a partial subject without an owner, and series of adjectives not linked to their subject and not presented with standard syntax. We think, “Man, Peter is wasted at work and not making nearly as much sense as he thinks.”

And although not present in this example, Rooney frequently uses inversion when Peter does have thoughts expressed in fully constructed sentences, like this one on page 307: “Talk to someone he would nearly like to,” which, sans inversion, would be this: “He would nearly like to talk to someone.”

It should be noted that other characters’ interiors do feature fragments, and, of course, not all of Peter’s thoughts are fragmented or inverted. But his interior is easily the most disintegrated, and by slicing up prepositional phrases, subject complements, verb phrases, and other parts of a sentence, Rooney is able to create a deeply convincing portrayal of mental illness.

Interested in trying this yourself? Studying this novel and methodically reconstructing some of Peter’s fragments will help you learn how to create a similar effect. But one last thing to note is that it doesn’t work in isolation—that is, a shattered interior needs to be contrasted with at least one other that’s relatively whole. Otherwise, it’s all the same, and if everyone’s unwell, terrifyingly, no one’s unwell.