Intermezzo

“Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning. […] Couldn’t go to work in the morning if he didn’t think something meant something meant something else. But what is it all leading up to. An end without an ending.”

30-something Peter feels that he has lost his sense of direction in life. He didn’t always feel this way: The start of the passage references his earlier thinking, which is tinged with embarrassment and the insistence that his thinking was “underexamined” and “irrational.” This allows Rooney to draw a parallel between Peter’s view of his younger self and his condescending assessment of Ivan.

“He loved you, she says. He didn’t know the first thing about me, Sylvia. We were allergic to each other. Never had a real conversation in our lives. Folds the tissue up and puts it in his pocket. Oh, you take conversation too seriously, she says. Life isn’t just talking, you know.”

Sylvia argues that the premium Peter bestows upon conversation shapes his perception of love. By implication, she suggests that people might behave in ways they aren’t able to articulate. Rooney thus uses this passage to advance the theme of The Limits of Language, driving the idea that one cannot base one’s sense of reality on language.

“The human mind, for all the credit he was just giving it a minute ago, is often repetitive, often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts, which in Ivan’s case are usually regretful in nature. Minor regrets, like asking that woman Margaret whether she played chess, horrible, and major regrets like declining or rather failing to say anything at his own father’s funeral. Major regrets like devoting his life to competitive chess only to watch his rating drop steadily over several years to the point where, etc. He’s been over all that before, the irretrievability of the past, what’s done being done, and now is not the time in any case.”

Ivan’s social awkwardness stems from his capacity to regret, which ranges from the major to the minor. What this passage really reveals is that Ivan is deeply reflective about the way he engages with other people. He likens his failure to speak at his father’s funeral to his longer-term decision to pursue a dwindling career in chess, underlining the sense that although both events are long past him now, he cannot help but rue his inaction.

“It is, of course, a desperately embarrassing situation—a situation which seems to render her entire life meaningless. Her professional life, eight years of marriage, whatever she believes about her personal values, everything. And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person? Feeling that he wants her, that all evening he has been looking at her and desiring her, isn’t it pleasurable? To embody the kind of woman he believed he couldn’t have—to incorporate that woman into herself, and allow him to have her.”

Rooney provides the justification for Margaret’s pursuit of a relationship with Ivan. Sleeping with Ivan goes against Margaret’s professional values, yet she cannot reconcile this with the gratification that his willing attention provides her. She indulges his infatuation because it rescues her from the monotony of her life in Clogherkeen.

“Someone just seems like they have to be exploiting someone here. But who, and how? He her, financially, sexually. Or she him, financially, emotionally. It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it. Money overall a very exploitative substance, creating it seems fresh kinds of exploitation in every form of relationality through which it passes. […] Now he feels bad, and actually does want to call her, to hear her gossiping about her friends, or describing what she’s reading for college, to interject occasionally with unsolicited advice or commentary, that kind of thing, but it’s too late. Why does everything have to be so complicated? He knows why. Flashing eyes of two animals through the undergrowth. Yes: what they want from each other.”

Peter reflects upon the dynamic of exploitation he has with Naomi, which is predicated on Peter’s access to capital that incentivizes Naomi to indulge his emotional needs. This complicates Peter’s need to invest his emotions in her because he does not know if he is feeding into the cycle of exploitation, or finally falling in love with someone other than Sylvia.

“For Margaret the last twenty years have passed this way: Anna on her bicycle at the age of sixteen, in school uniform, laughing, heedless of the vulgar shouts from the boys; then at twenty-six, coloured scarf flying out behind her, skirt spattered with dirty water, bag of oranges in her basket; now at thirty-six, happy, tired, more often walking than cycling, pushing a second-hand pram with a mismatched wheel. Of course, from Anna’s point of view, Margaret thinks, these years must have passed the other way: watching her, Margaret, growing older. Easier to perceive the way the years accumulate in others. For Anna there must be such a Margaret, who has been one thing and is now another, while Margaret looking at her own life sees only the inwardly flowing blur of all experience.”

Anna functions as a foil for Margaret. In this passage, Rooney reveals how time has affected them both by contrast. Though they remain close friends, Margaret can’t help but feel that experience has widened the gap between them, making Anna harder to understand in her tired happiness and making Margaret harder to see in her overwhelming isolation.

“For Peter, social systems are never confusing, always transparent, and usually manipulable to his own ends. He is someone who not only knows a vast number of people, but through knowing them can somehow make them do things he wants them to do. He won’t be sitting in his apartment typing ‘dog foster ireland help’ or whatever into a search engine. He’ll be in a big room somewhere surrounded by people who think he’s really smart and interesting, and one of them will probably be like the CEO of a dog fostering charity. Peter could even at this moment be regaling the CEO with a story about his loser younger brother who can’t find a temporary home for their dog, and they’re laughing together. However: let them laugh. If it means the dog will have somewhere safe and caring to stay for a while until Ivan finds a new flat or house-share where dogs are welcome, laugh it up, as far as he’s concerned.”

Where the novel began with Peter’s supercilious assessment of Ivan, it now features Ivan’s assessment of Peter, viewing the older brother’s charm through a disdainful lens. This aspect of the novel’s perspective shift is key—it underlines the way that Ivan tolerates Peter’s terrible qualities because it resolves their problems. This complicates their dynamic, showing how they need, even as they revile, each other.

“Of course, he and his brother both wanted their lives to consist of winning all the time and never losing: this is presumably true of everyone. No one ever wants to lose. And yet for both Peter and Ivan, this particular feeling has perhaps been more important, more intense than for other people: the desire to win all the time, and also the naive youthful belief that it would be possible to live such a life, now soured by experience.”

As Peter and Ivan admit their respective regrets over debate and chess at dinner, Ivan reflects upon their shared weakness, which is their fear of vulnerability. This plays into their dynamic as brothers who have no apparent respect for each other, but also have deep concern and care for the other that they cannot display. Unwilling to accept the embarrassment of their past defeats, they typically project their “naïve youthful belief” that they are invincible onto others. This passage represents a reprieve from that projection.

“Margaret is reminded of the way she felt when she first met Ivan: as if life had slipped free of its netting. As if the netting itself had all along been an illusion, nothing real. An idea, which could not contain or describe the borderless all-enveloping reality of life. Now […] Margaret feels that she can perceive the miraculous beauty of life itself, lived only once and then gone forever, the bloom of a perfect and impermanent flower, never to be retrieved. This is life, the experience, this is all there has ever been. To force this moment into contact with her ordinary existence only seems to reveal how constricting, how misshapen her ideas of life have been before.”

As their relationship becomes more serious, Ivan’s effect on Margaret’s life evolves, growing beyond the cursory, novel impact of a brief sexual encounter. This passage marks a turning point in Margaret’s opinion of the world, transcending the physical borders of the town she has lived in all her life. Where she previously felt that life had been sapped of its potential, marking her entry into middle age, she now allows the immensity of life to distract her from the bad feelings her family and romantic history have impressed upon her.

“In the weeks since his father died Ivan has not heard these words from anyone, I love you, or said them to anyone either. Does this explain his intense longing to hear and say them again, to relieve the pressure of this confined force inside his body? Even to think of Margaret with love gives a little relief, to allow the feeling of love into his thoughts, like a flower opening outwards inside his mind.”

Rooney hints that Ivan’s motive for pursuing his relationship with Margaret is tied to the grief he continues to feel over his father’s death, in an extension of The Frailty of the Material World. He wants to hear Margaret express her love for him because he is still adjusting to his new fatherless reality. Thus, his desire for Margaret is at first merely associative, rather than pursued for its own sake.

“Mere privilege he thinks can’t touch what he has so richly acquired. Beauty, culture: yes. Can’t be bought. […] And perhaps it is just a delusion. Fantasy of making them feel as inferior as they try to make him. He doesn’t want after all for others to be poor, doesn’t even want to be rich. No. He only wants what he has always wanted: to be right, to be once and for all proven right.”

Rooney uses this passage to strengthen Peter’s characterization: His cultural literacy is one of the traits that define him. Set apart from his more privileged peers, Peter seeks to have his existence validated, which resonates with his desire to follow life towards a meaningful end. This stems from the sense that the humiliation he has suffered throughout his life must have some kind of greater significance.

“His interest in everything about her: did she have a happy childhood, was she popular in school, was she always so beautiful or did she grow into her looks more. To reconstruct her life for him, the story of her life, her personality, to make herself interesting to him, to become in the process interesting even to herself.”

In an earlier passage, Rooney showed the impact of Ivan on Margaret’s life, enriching her perception of the world around her. As Ivan tries to actively involve himself in Margaret’s life by expressing curiosity about her past, she realizes that her life was never dull or monotonous to begin with. In other words, looking at her life from Ivan’s perspective allows her to see that the experiences she has had are both compelling and complicated, in spite of their geographical smallness.

“But I think, as sad as it is to say, I think people aren’t always very nice to the people they love.”

Rooney uses Margaret to voice one of the complexities of love, especially within families. Ivan finds it hard to accept that his brother loves him because they have no respect for each other. The novel’s shifting perspective, however, allows the reader to realize the truth of Margaret’s statement as they witness Peter and Ivan privately express their deep concern for one another. The contradiction of love and respect and the tension between statement and behavior leans into The Limits of Language.

“To love, and for his love to be accepted, yes. It was in fact painful, the relief of all that compression suddenly, to say the words aloud, and hear her saying them, to be loved by her, it was so needed that it actually hurt. Not even a feeling of unmixed happiness, but of happiness that was strongly and confusingly mixed with many other feelings. Sadness, missing his father, and a kind of shame somehow, because each passing day seemed to bring Ivan further away from him and the life they used to have together, a life that was receding increasingly into the past, into the realm of childhood and adolescence. The realisation that his adulthood, into which he was entering now so definitively, and which would last all the rest of his life, would have to be lived without his father. That he was becoming a person his father would never know.”

Unlike the earlier passage in which Ivan desired Margaret’s love for associative reasons, this passage illustrates a larger crisis that strikes Ivan as he navigates his relationship and his grief. Rather than find consolation in Margaret’s love, Ivan now finds that he is getting further from the self he was when his father was still alive. This escalates his anxiety around The Frailty of the Material World by underlining the temporary nature of his father and of all that he loves in the world.

“It goes to show, Ivan thinks, that the difference between truth and lying is complicated. You think you’re fitting language onto the world in a certain way, like a child fitting the right-shaped toy into the right-shaped slot. But at times you realise that that’s a false picture too. Language doesn’t fit onto reality like a toy fitting into a slot. Reality is actually one thing and language something else. You just have to agree with yourself not to think about it too much.”

In this passage, Rooney underscores The Limits of Language, showing how articulation will not always result in a one-to-one correspondence with reality. The idea that language might accurately describe the world clashes with the experiences of the novel’s characters, who constantly negotiate what they mean when they express how they feel for one another.

“When he and Margaret are together, for instance, the intelligence that animates instinctively his gestures, touching, is that not the same intelligence that suggests to him the move that will later trap the knight? It is the same, himself, his own intelligence, his personhood.”

Ivan has a recurring internal debate about the interaction between the mind and the body, unsure whether the mind that produces abstract thoughts and the physical body are separate or part of a greater complex system. In this passage, Ivan arrives at a conclusion that unifies them, suggesting that there is an inextricable link between the abstract strategy that allows him to win chess games and the physical movements that mark his relationship with Margaret. The question of people existing beyond their corporeality nudges at The Frailty of the Material World.

“There is more to life than great chess. Okay, great chess is still a part of life, and it can be a very big part, very intense, satisfying, and pleasant to dwell on in the mind’s eye: but nonetheless, life contains many things. Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live.”

This passage demonstrates the function of chess as a major symbol in the narrative. Where chess is traditionally played as a struggle for power, mirroring many of the romantic relationships in the novel, Ivan has played enough chess to recognize a beautiful strategy whenever it is played. Likewise, the novel’s relationships move past the question of power balance to illuminate or enrich the characters’ experience of life.

“How capable he has been of holding in his mind with no apparent struggle such contradictory beliefs and feelings. The false true lover, the cynical idealist, the atheist at his prayers. Everything lethally intermixed, everything breaching its boundaries, nothing staying in its right place. She, the other, himself. Even Christine, Ivan, this married girlfriend of his. Their father: from beyond the grave. Conceptual collapse of one thing into another, all things into one.”

This passage marks a significant turning point in Peter’s relationship with the two women he loves. By realizing the contradiction of his devotion to both, Peter becomes overwhelmed by all the other contradictions that exist in his life—a state of being that conflicts with his need to exert control and find order, meaning, and beauty in the world. These contradictions, however, are largely the result of Peter’s attempts to impose linguistic order upon his life, aligning with The Limits of Language.

“There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgement, reproval, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another.”

Margaret faces the social dilemma that defines her narrative arc. She wants to free herself from the systems of judgment that define the dynamics of her small town. On the other hand, those same systems of judgment make her connection to others possible because she has to mediate the way others, including Ivan, perceive her for approval.

“Okay, maybe he was a creep, maybe he was an incel. Maybe he didn’t relate to people on a normal level. It was better than being an arrogant narcissist at least. Better than arranging his whole life around going to parties and getting blowjobs from brainless rich girls. Right, but was it actually better than that? No, of course not, of course it wasn’t. At eighteen, nineteen years old, Ivan felt a crushing desire to arrange his own life in this exact way, going to parties, getting blowjobs, he would have given anything, he would have pretended to have almost any opinions he could think of, in order to make this happen to him. Which Peter knew very well, and thought was hilarious, because they hated each other.”

This passage once again shows the complex ways that Ivan thinks of Peter. This time, Ivan also reveals something about his own desires and regrets in life. He balks at the idea of Peter’s social skills, calling him an “arrogant narcissist” for the way Peter uses his relationships to boost his ego. At the same time, the attention Peter gets from others is something that Ivan craves, which makes him no better or worse than the brother he despises—nuance that plays into Sibling Dynamics and Romantic Relationships.

“They have shown, they have demonstrated the possibility of these things, Ivan thinks, and therefore in a way proven to themselves and each other that their father is really gone, not only from the house, but from reality itself. […] How can it be real to think of these things, this forcefield sensation, this desire to hurt or protect? Things that are real belong to the material world. Feelings, memories, ideas, dreams: these things are outside the realm of objective reality, that perfect self-contained realm, like a snow globe, with everything real inside it. But where is their father now? Inside the realm, or outside? A fact, a reality, or just a memory, a feeling?”

Following his fight with Peter, Ivan feels his sense of reality destabilize. He cannot reconcile the absence of his father with the reality of the violence that the brothers are now capable of without him. Straddling questions of reality and abstraction, Ivan reckons with The Frailty of the Material World.

“The future was a mystery, after all, that was true. Within its infinite folds it contained the possibility, however remote, that she might still be salvaged, her body, from the wreck of all her wasted years […] The only answer to death, she thought: to echo back its name in that way, with all the same intensity and senselessness, on the side of life.”

Margaret resolves her anxieties around a future with Ivan by accepting that mystery about what is to come gives life meaning. Rather than condemn herself to an assurance that her life will go on under its least desirable conditions, Margaret opens herself to the possibility and hope that surprise offers her.

“To see a man and a woman walking together: to name in the mind their relation to one another, as it were automatically. Which is to select from the assortment of existing names the one that seems appropriate to the particular case. To say to oneself that in relation to the man, this particular woman must be a friend, or else a girlfriend, or a wife, or sister. An act of naming which stands open to correction, but correction only in the form of replacement: that is, the replacement of one existing name for another.”

By considering the way conventional labels fail to describe his complex relationship with Sylvia, Peter reflects upon The Limits of Language. He suggests that language is always open to revision, because it will always be struggling to capture a reality that is impossible to fully articulate.