Sally Rooney in Merrion Square, Dublin, Aug. 28, 2021. Photograph by Ellius Grace for The New York Times.

Celebrated Irish author Sally Rooney has the incredible talent of writing about nothing. Rather than creating deep, expansive, and riveting worlds of fantasy or wonder, she creates engaging novels by simply highlighting the mundanity of life and the situations within it. This is especially true in her newest novel, “Intermezzo.”

“Intermezzo,” a novel about two distant brothers, Ivan and Peter Koubek, coping with the recent loss of their father, compares the differences in lives between siblings that never really liked each other, even after childhood. Ivan is a 22-year-old competitive chess player, and Peter is a 32-year-old lawyer. The novel also features Ivan’s 36 year-old girlfriend, Margaret, and Peter’s girlfriends, Naomi and Sylvia.

At 448 pages, every page is dense and full of never ending sentences. While this makes sense for the style that Rooney has carefully crafted for herself, it also makes it incredibly hard to read for short periods of time or if you are in a distracting environment. Having to give your complete and full attention is a chore sometimes and at times that’s exactly what reading this felt like.

Rooney’s style consists of train-of-thought-like descriptions, being told in a present voice from a few different characters within the novel, both of the brothers, Ivan and Peter, and sometimes Ivan’s girlfriend, Margaret. Since the story’s main focus is on the mental well-being and decisions of its characters, Rooney’s writing style makes sense. By creating seemingly never-ending sentences and rapidly changing perspectives of the subjects of those sentences, it puts the reader into the minds of the characters that you’re meant to be understanding. If Rooney had decided to use a more typical format, use quotation marks to indicate dialogue, separating paragraphs at a normal rate, and shortening her clauses within her sentences, it would feel more familiar and digestible for the reader, but the point would be lost.

It’s similar when it comes to her use of long chapters and “parts.” With the book being separated into three parts, or acts, consisting of long chapters, usually being 50 pages or more, the reader has to stick around to find out what happens, or “the point” of the story. Rooney’s writing in this novel, and her previous books, is completely about encompassing the reader into being the character and completely understanding their actions. While the reader may not completely agree with what they’re doing, especially with the brother Peter and his disastrous life, the reader understands why these things are happening, completely and thoroughly. Her writing can be extremely dense and frustrating to understand and digest, but there’s a method to the madness and it’s easy to see how some readers absolutely fall in love with her words.

When it comes to characters, that’s where Rooney really shines. Ivan was extremely relatable and his half of the story was completely enveloping. His socially awkwardness as a young man just trying to figure things out on his own after his father just passed is an easy character to identify with. His chapters were engaging and mostly left a positive impression compared to his brother.

Peter’s chapters were much harder to get through. His being a drug-addicted lawyer who is actively blowing up his own life along with two other women was not entertaining or interesting. Peter would judge Ivan harshly in conversations with each of these women, calling his brother odd or strange, and underestimating the importance of their father to Ivan. While being able to create characters that fuel a writer with such hatred or disdain is the mark of a skilled writer, reading another 50 pages from Peter’s point-of-view can be extremely frustrating, and for me, unsatisfying.

While her characters can be at either end of the spectrum from relatable to frustrating, it cannot be said that her characters lack realism or fullness, that is Rooney’s absolute bread and butter. As with her ability to create a mostly entertaining world from mundanity, she does the same with her characters. They aren’t anyone special like the President’s son or royalty, they’re just people going about their lives. One being a young man fresh out of college and another having been out of college and working for quite a while. Ivan and Peter, and all the characters they’re surrounded by and interact with, are ordinary and have ordinary flaws, but they are also full of life.

When it comes to the actual plot of “Intermezzo,” it can simply be said that there really isn’t one. There’s definitely plot points, things that happen that move the characters along, but there’s really no antagonist in this novel that drives a need in the characters. The only thing that could be considered an “antagonist” are the characters themselves. This story, as well as the rest of Rooney’s novels, are the epitome of a “man versus self” story. Ivan and Peter are just trying to go about their lives; Ivan trying to jump start his life, find a home for his childhood dog, and balance being an average chess player with the need to make a life from it. All while Peter is starting to realize that he doesn’t like where he’s at in life, having two girlfriends, working a job that he hates, and running on drugs just to get through the day. Similar to her novel “Normal People,” which was about the interconnected lives of two young people in and out of love, “Intermezzo” is about the inner lives of people and the state of their distinct and complicated relationships.

“Intermezzo” is available from Macmillan Publishers.