Sally Rooney’s 'Intermezzo' Feels Very Familiar

It would have been easy, a book or two ago, to blame it on age or circumstance: young writer, whiz kid, former debate champion, writes the same characters over and over, likely loosely based on her or her friends. I wouldn’t have cared for that, but it would have made sense, an excuse for why the novels kept more or less moving around the same sets of interpersonal dynamics without ever saying anything quite real about them. If that were true, it would have also followed that she’d grow out of it. Life happens to everyone, eventually, even writers with bestselling novels turned into Hulu/BBC shows. And then they, her characters, would have also grown out of it. But Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, is populated with people we’ve met before.