let me preface this by saying that i like Sally Rooney. BWWAY is a favorite of mine; i like the lack of quotation marks; the irishness and pathological inability to communicate clearly that marks her characters is both interesting and endearing to me; etc. given my educational background and the kinds of novels i like to read, i am, in many ways, her ideal audience—and so i was looking forward to Intermezzo. i wanted to rave about it.
but i can’t. 
there’s a lot to appreciate about it. intellectually, it’s a tour de force—incredibly clever in its intermingling of themes and form, thorough in its psychological development of its characters (minus, arguably, one), and intertextually engaged in a way that makes it a delight to read for a certain kind of literary-theoretical nerd (such as myself). i would certainly like to study the novel, would enjoy taking it apart and figuring out what all makes it tick… and i’ve already begun to do so. i’ve had to—because i found the ending unsatisfying. and i need to know why. 
my best explanation, as this point in my reveries, is that peter’s storyline is the problem.

most novels with a love triangle like the one shown in Intermezzo end the text with a resolution of that triangle—whether that means a partner is chosen and the other rejected or some other nefarious event takes place to neutralize one of the parties (i’m looking at YOU, Tarr). rooney, it seems, wanted to take a different approach—to resolve the conflict not by making peter choose, but by rejecting the necessity of the choice. he tries to reject naomi, but that only makes sylvia reject him. rooney attempts fo convince us that both are necessary to him, that he loves them both, and that he is himself the problem—given the particular contours of his savior complex, as they play into his obsession with his social status, etc. i don’t find this compelling, though, because i don’t find (1) this to be a convincing argument or (2) naomi to be a convincing love interest for him. as far as i can tell, the only thing she has to offer is sexual comfort. she feeds his ego, but is hardly a partner to him… but then, she didn’t really feel fully developed, either. our first impression of her seemed to be just affirmed in the end—and while peter and naomi say a lot, very little of their relationship is actually shown to be as meaningful as they claim. 
indeed, for all of sylvia’s problems, i'm not convinced, watching the dynamics of both sides of the love triangle, that the themes which rooney seems to want to engage with couldn’t be as effectively played out by focusing on their relationship rather than splitting the difference between two characters. 
because ultimately, that’s what it seems that rooney did. she’s at her best, in my opinion, when she’s working in quads… having a five-character cast was new, but instead of leaning into a new angle, i can’t help but feel that she tried to be subversive by refusing to choose… but rather than creating a new approach to narrative function, she ended up not makes any significant move. maybe this is fitting in a novel which generally ends without distinct views of these characters’ futures, but i walk away from that storyline in particular without hope for its long-term maintenance. the detente was presented like a radical choice—but it felt like a cop-out.

for all my complaints, though, there was a great deal of beauty to be found in this book. the sibling dynamics were heartbreaking and the handling of grief was tasteful and moving. rooney’s prowess as a writer of dialogue remains unmatched, and the characters whose heads we are let into are profoundly human—that is to say, complex, flawed, and generally blind. the development of acknowledgement (in the Cavellian sense) between the brothers was my favorite part of the novel—with the handling of the passage of time as a near second. if peter’s end had been different—well, so would my rating be.