INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I was really grooving through my to-read pile this year until I came up on this one. Not that it’s a bad book — it’s really well-written. Exceptionally, actually. At first I felt like an unwilling spectator to these couple’s drama and wasn’t sure it was anything worth experiencing besides the stream-of-consciousness prose. And then it clicked. Sometimes you don’t need it to go anywhere groundbreaking, you don’t need a miraculous life to follow. Watching the ebb and flow of a relationship straining, maybe breaking, is enough. An example of a life, the fact of its existence similar enough to yours but maybe not quite, it is and it isn’t in a million different ways, but still somewhere in there is something interesting, isn’t there? To watch someone else struggle with what to say, with their self-esteem, with whatever bittersweet bonds connect us to each other. It’s interesting to watch someone else try to be human, failing at many things but excelling at that one.

Sally Rooney does this by describing all those little thoughts you have in the midst of a moment. Focusing on who you’re talking to while also clocking the strangers around you and the light coming through the window, something said in conversation turning to something introspective, to a memory, back to the present. I don’t know if all her books are written in this structure, but I enjoyed it more than I expected. In lesser hands it would’ve been a drag, possibly unreadable. Not here.

I expect I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. The impressive recreation of rapid thought dug its way into my head and now I almost can’t imagine reading any other way. It had its low points, but I’m going to miss its quirks.