With the publication of Sally Rooney’s first novel, CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, in 2017, both the literary world and ordinary readers recognized the presence of a considerable talent. NORMAL PEOPLE and BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU, the two books that followed, only confirmed that judgment.

Now, with the arrival of INTERMEZZO, Rooney has taken another significant step in building her impressive resume. Like its predecessors, much of the story focuses on the lives, and especially the romantic entanglements, of young, well-educated and highly articulate Irish women and men. But this time, she’s created a densely woven, multilayered family drama that’s every bit as psychologically astute as her previous efforts, while mining a new and deeper vein of human relationships.

"INTERMEZZO feels as timeless as a classic 19th-century novel and as contemporary as the latest cultural trend.... [R]eaders can depend on [Rooney] to produce thoughtful, satisfying fiction for many years to come."

INTERMEZZO (the term describes a musical interlude or in chess an unexpected move that poses an immediate threat) follows its five principal characters over the course of several months as a damp, chilly, Dublin autumn slides into winter. Brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek are only beginning to deal with the loss of their father to cancer after several years of illness. Thirty-two-year-old Peter is a human rights barrister and law professor who soothes his depression and periodic thoughts of suicide with intermittent doses of Xanax and alcohol. Ivan, 10 years his junior, has just earned his degree in theoretical physics and works fitfully as a freelance data analyst. At one time, Ivan was a rising chess star, but he fears that his ascendant career has stalled and may have even shifted into reverse.

Peter thinks of Ivan as a “complete oddball,” while Ivan regards his older brother as someone who “goes along the surface of life.” Though they haven’t yet reached a fraternal clash of Genesis-level proportions, tensions between the two flicker and occasionally flare.

When Ivan travels to a small west Ireland town for a chess tournament, he meets Margaret, the 36-year-old program director of the local arts center, and the two fall immediately into a relationship that’s simultaneously intense and comfortably domestic. She’s grappling quietly with her own distress, after divorcing an alcoholic husband whose public drunkenness became something of a scandal in their town.

But Ivan isn’t the only Koubek brother in a disparate-age romantic relationship. Peter is dating the free-spirited Naomi, who is in her last year of college and living as a squatter with friends in Dublin. When she’s evicted, she moves into Peter’s flat. But the true love of Peter’s life is Sylvia, his college classmate and former debating partner. Six years earlier, she was seriously injured in an accident. Although she’s able to work as a college literature professor, she’s dogged by chronic pain that led her to break off her relationship with Peter, but they remain close friends. However, even as he’s falling in love with Naomi and enjoying the pleasure of their lusty sex life, he can’t shake his emotional attachment to the more stable and intellectual Sylvia.

Shifting among the points of view of Peter, Ivan and Margaret, Rooney creates a nuanced portrait of grief, sibling rivalry, and love of both the platonic and erotic variety. INTERMEZZO is the longest of her novels so far, but it doesn’t read as one that’s padded out with unnecessary scenes or superfluous description. Instead, the story’s organic qualities allow Rooney to explore some provocative questions: How do two siblings with markedly different relationships to a deceased parent come to terms with his death? Why does a relationship between an older man and a much younger woman seem more “normal” than the converse? Rooney’s characters obviously are intelligent, but they swing between moments of sharp self-awareness and emotional blindness that make them feel intensely human.

While it would be inaccurate to label Rooney as an experimental novelist, since the structure of INTERMEZZO is comfortably conventional and sweeps the reader along on the flow of her beautifully constructed sentences, she decisively avoids monotony by resorting to a couple of arresting prose techniques. As if to mimic the real process of thought, passages of clipped, urgent immediacy like this one appear with some regularity:

“Cloak of grey quiet lending to the streets a melancholy dignity. Empty the city feels, desolate, dimly beautiful. Ten minutes, twenty, and he’s crossing the canal. Feels his nose streaming, cold. Tired he thinks, staring at a screen all day. Stinging in his eyes. Exhaustion, that’s all.”

And in another, subtly different example, Rooney occasionally alters her sentence structure to provide an almost Joycean quality to her prose:

“Bare the trees and hanging low their slender leafless branches. Decanting now and then a handful of cool gathered rainwater onto the gravel. Along the avenues they make their way, saying nothing at first, only sipping coffee.”

INTERMEZZO feels as timeless as a classic 19th-century novel and as contemporary as the latest cultural trend. After the publication of only four novels and with her capacious talent, it would be foolish to suggest that Sally Rooney has already reached some sort of career peak. What the novel does signal is that readers can depend on her to produce thoughtful, satisfying fiction for many years to come.