Men are reading fiction less and less. When Dazed wrote about the phenomenon earlier this year, social media comment sections and Reddit boards were flooded with counterarguments from men who do read contemporary novels but, like it or not, these were the outliers. (According to the data, 80 per cent of book buyers in the UK and North America are women.) Other commenters complained that they would buy books, if only the industry was interested in publishing the kind of stuff they would like to read. But typically, these are books deemed ‘useful’ or ‘productive’, focused on personal development. They are not romance novels, as if stories about love and relationships have nothing useful to teach us about living – men, in particular.

Ivan Koubek, one of two male protagonists in Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, mainly reads thick paperbacks on chess theory. He’s 22, plays chess competitively, and “[doesn’t] exactly have what you would call a job”. Like many men his age in 2022, he’s briefly worked as a delivery driver, and does bits and pieces of data analysis for faceless tech companies who don’t pay his invoices on time. Peter, his 32-year-old brother, is a lawyer in Dublin; his charismatic exterior, large social circle, and abundant love life mask deep insecurities, plus a dependence on alcohol and pills to get through his days and insomniac nights. The brothers’ father has recently died, and it’s this that propels them through Rooney’s moving study of an unusual and formative period in each of their lives.

Sally Rooney has been publishing novels for just over seven years now. Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You all explored the experiences of young women living under late capitalism, and some familiar tropes return in Intermezzo: irrational desires in conflict with the supposedly-hyper-rational markets that have increasingly shaped our lives these last few decades; sociopolitical debates that always seem on the verge of tipping over into sex scenes, and often do; the tactile presence of a neck chain in said sex scenes, primed for the soft lighting of a future TV adaptation. The style is also familiar: clear, lucid language is used to unpick the tangled systems of Western society, breaking down into Joycean fragments at times of emotional crisis (there are many). This is the first of her novels, though, where the vast majority of events are seen from a male perspective, wheeling freely between Peter and Ivan’s interior monologues.

It’s tempting to say that Rooney just got around to figuring out men, but that’s obviously not true. Some of the most moving scenes in Normal People came courtesy of Connell (rewatch the Paul Mescal-starring therapy scenes in the TV adaptation and try not to cry) and Beautiful World’s Felix provides a playful, incisive juxtaposition to the highbrow world of a celebrity novelist protagonist. Conversations about men in the first three books are overshadowed, though, by the author’s reputation as the eminent Sad Girl Novelist. With Intermezzo, she proves once and for all that she can write men as convincingly as any contemporary male writer, which is handy – as Barry Pierce has noted for Dazed, actual young male novelists are in very short supply.

It feels appropriate that Rooney chooses the death of a patriarch – both literal, and maybe symbolic – as a starting point... Masculinity is in crisis. Straight men’s libido is on the wane, while Gen Z dreams of the trad, monogamous relationships of old. Young men hide themselves away on incel forums, or alienate prospective partners with tactics gleaned from ‘rizz artists’

It feels appropriate that Rooney chooses the death of a patriarch – both literal, and maybe symbolic – as a starting point for Ivan and Peter’s respective emotional rollercoaster rides in the 400-and-something pages that follow. After all, they’re living and negotiating relationships in a time when (as we’re frequently told) masculinity is in crisis. IRL, straight men’s libido is on the wane, while Gen Z dreams of the trad, monogamous relationships of old. Young men hide themselves away on incel forums, or alienate prospective partners with tactics gleaned from “rizz artists”. Ivan himself admits there was a time, not so long ago, when “maybe he was a creep [...] an incel” too, staying up late to watch Jordan Peterson-adjacent videos with titles like “College Professor Destroys Feminism in 3 Minutes” and type in “depressingly niche” porn titles. But he doesn’t do that any more, because he’s in love.

The relationships that Peter and Ivan find themselves in, in the wake of their dad’s death, are complex and unconventional. Ivan meets Margaret, a 36-year-old programme director at a small-town arts centre, and their lives quickly become intertwined (2024: the year of age-gap relationships with younger men). When Intermezzo strays away from the Koubek brothers’ lives, it’s to explore Margaret’s thoughts – the guilty pleasures of her relationship with Ivan, which she hides from friends and family for much of the novel, mixed with dark reflections on her failed marriage, and an overall feeling that “life has slipped free of its netting”. Ivan’s initial attempts to seduce her are stumbling and sweet, as seen through her eyes: “He seems to have taken on exclusive responsibility for what appears to him a very difficult task – the task, unless she is mistaken, of seducing an older woman he has just met – and he appears to feel frustrated with himself for not knowing how to accomplish this task, frustrated and guilty. These feelings would not arise in a young woman,” she adds. “Different feelings, equally unpleasant, but different.”

Peter experiences different difficulties in his own love life. On the one hand, he’s still devoted to Sylvia, his first love (also 32); on the other, he’s dating a 23-year-old student, Naomi, with whom his relationship is vaguely transactional. We don’t hear from Sylvia or Naomi directly, but we know that the former has a brilliant mind and broke up with Peter after an accident that left her chronically ill, while the latter is perennially carefree, accepting money and housing from Peter, or else selling NSFW selfies to keep herself afloat. At some point or another, almost all of these characters – Peter, Ivan, Margaret, Sylvia, and Naomi – are brought together. Here, as ever, Rooney resists the temptation to simplify the world and its moral landscape to help them get along. As Margaret thinks, when she realises her relationship with Ivan isn’t the ticket to freedom she’d expected: “The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. [...] More life, more and more of life.”

Fragile masculinity is a problem to be solved, Intermezzo suggests, but not only that – masculinity also is truly fragile, and occasionally deserves to be treated as such

These moments of unbridled complexity are where Rooney’s writing really shines, and (male readers take note) where it offers the most opportunities for personal enlightenment. At points, for example, Peter and Ivan’s past and present conflicts spill over into inarticulate outbursts and even violence, but the action is far outweighed by its introspective aftermath, shameful scenes and bitter phrases played on a loop in the characters’ minds, particularly Peter’s, as he wanders about Dublin in a drunken daze fantasising about a world without him in it. Yes, fragile masculinity is a problem to be solved, Intermezzo suggests, but not only that – masculinity also is truly fragile, and occasionally deserves to be treated as such.

In fact, everything is more fragile than it initially seems: sexuality, health, gender roles, family ties, spirituality – basically all of the social structures that prop up society in the 21st century. While Ivan’s relationship with Margaret struggles against more material pressures (her family’s disapproval, and Peter’s, despite his own age-gap relationship), it’s the breakdown of these abstract structures that plagues Peter’s conscience as he’s forced to come to terms with his multipolar love life. He sees his situation, which is basically a polyamorous relationship with two women he loves, as a problem with no easy, predetermined solution: “Encountering in everyday situations new irreducibly complex dilemmas, thickets of intersecting desires and preferences. Having to meet the needs of the moment, every moment, forever.”

This is a difficult way to live, because it requires constant engagement with the world, instead of falling back on tradition and living a life laid out by the generations before us. “But why. Why should it be so difficult,” Peter asks. “Surely everyone knows and accepts privately that relationships are complicated. Forget anyway about what people think.” This doesn’t just go for romantic relationships, either – in a world of tangled connections and intermeshed systems of meaning, no problem can be solved in isolation. If there is a masculinity crisis (and… there is) then it can’t be dealt with in a vacuum. It requires a radical rethinking of a whole knotty network of beliefs. The same goes for division based on class, health, age and everything else. 

More often than not, the conflict in Intermezzo relies on the intangible nature of these systems. Characters try to penetrate them with language, but mostly fail to say exactly what they mean. At least to this (male) reader, the core achievement of Intermezzo – Sally Rooney’s best work yet – is how it lays these vast, interlocking systems bare, like one of Ivan’s chess books unpicking a particularly tricky position. Rooney paints a picture of these structures with a rare clarity, while showing them at work on a very relatable human level, and in doing so she suggests a way to move beyond them in the future, to reimagine how we relate to each other, and to ourselves. And if that isn’t ‘useful’ and ‘productive’, then what is?