It’s Sally Rooney week here at Deez Links! On Thursday, I’ll send you a roundup of internet links about her new novel, Intermezzo, so you can be up to date on all the Rooney discourse. Later, I’ll also send you a compilation of my 50 favorite lines from the novel so we can swoon over them together.
One of my silly romantic hopes and dreams for Deez Links is that it can be a place where people get to nerd out about great books on a more granular level—keeping up with reviews and interviews are great, but sometimes all you want to do is trade your favorite passages back and forth with a smart, similarly-obsessed friend, no? That’s what I’d love for the Deez Links Book Club podcast to turn into…
So: this week, I called up New Yorker writer / One Thing founder / bestie Kyle Chayka to discuss Intermezzo—not just its themes and place in Rooney’s oeuvre, but also the literal sentences we most liked and characters we enjoyed. It’s two Rooneyheads Rooneying out, and I hope you enjoy our conversation (and join in with your fave parts in the comments!).
Questions asked & answered include…
What’s up with all the “Yoda-speak” / inverted sentence fragments used in Peter’s stream-of-consciousness? Do we like the effect?
What do we think of Naomi, the novel’s archetypal Gen Z character, whose internet slang use sets her clearly apart from the maybe more “refined” millennial characters?
If we can peg each Sally novel to a micro-life stage (Convos with Friends being her early 20s book; Intermezzo feels like an early 30s book…), what’s her mid-30s novel gonna be?
What is it about the way Sally writes about animals that’s so endearing?
Why does the ending feel a bit too much like a millennial fairy tale? Is that why Sally Rooney novels are so popular, because she’s wrapping otherwise typical heteronormative romances with brainy prose and Marxist politics??
Note: The only thing I’ll say is that this pod episode is probably best enjoyed either while you’re reading Intermezzo right now or, ideally, immediately once you’ve finished it (spoilers abound).
As always, special thanks to Rachel Yang and Harry Krinsky. Next month, we’re doing The Corrections…….
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