Disability and Desire in "Intermezzo"
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Last week, like tens of thousands of other readers across the globe, I made my way to a local bookstore to purchase Intermezzo, the fourth novel by Sally Rooney. I almost never buy new books these days, let alone new hardbacks, but Rooney fever was hard to resist. Although I disliked her last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, and even had mixed feelings about her world-conquering hit Normal People, it’s so rare for a book to be such a massive cultural event that, as someone who cares a lot about books, I couldn’t help going along for the ride.
I was looking forward to Intermezzo, although my ambivalence about Rooney’s previous two novels tempered my expectations. But I wasn’t expecting Intermezzo to feature the most poorly conceived — and, frankly, offensive — disability subplot I’ve encountered in a new work of fiction so far this year. This is, in part, because so few contemporary novels take on disability (or chronic illness) as a topic at all. (As I mentioned in my last newsletter, two major recent examples are the flawed There’s Nothing Wrong with Her and the excellent Small Rain, which I wrote about here.) In Intermezzo, Rooney gestures to the plight of chronic pain and illness, but strangely chooses to deprive the reader of details that would make it easier to understand her character’s condition. Against this muddled backdrop, she goes on to paint a picture of disability as inherently sexless and martyred.
Intermezzo focuses on two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, who are mourning the recent death of their father. While Ivan, a chess prodigy in his early twenties, embarks on a relationship with an older woman, his brother Peter, a decade older and working as a human rights lawyer in Dublin, is torn between Sylvia, his former girlfriend, and Naomi, a college student who has previously made money on a website that resembles OnlyFans. (The details of Naomi’s sex work are also kept vague.) Sylvia, whom Peter met and began dating in college, suffered a catastrophic car accident several years later, which left her unable to have sex. Though Rooney mentions that Sylvia has had surgeries over the years that have passed between her accident and the present day of the novel, she never explicitly explains what has caused Sylvia’s current condition.
As Emily Gould points out in the Vulture newsletter Book Gossip, this is weird, and — if you are a person with a vagina — hard to intuitively understand. Isabel Cristo, a fact-checker at New York, tells Gould that an OB/GYN she reached out to about the matter explained, “‘Everything is within the realm of possibility,’ but the idea that this was a medical condition that was brought on by a physical trauma definitely threw him for a loop.” There are certainly conditions that can make intercourse difficult or impossible for women, but as the OB/GYN points out, conditions like vaginismus are not caused by physical trauma. As I was reading the novel, the only thing I could think of that would explain Sylvia’s condition was a severe pelvic injury, which would undoubtedly have left her with bladder and digestive problems, and probably mobility issues, as well. But Sylvia, though we know she suffers from chronic pain, is otherwise seemingly unimpaired.
I go into such detail here because I can only conclude that Rooney worked backwards, first deciding that Sylvia should be unable to have sex, and then clumsily concocting an implausible scenario to explain this impediment. I am only speculating, and in theory, this is a normal thought process for an author; in a successful novel, though, explanations for characters’ behaviors and circumstances are well-thought-through and make logical and emotional sense. Sylvia, by contrast, treats the inability to have penetrative sex as the end of her ability to have romantic or sexual relationships.
Implausibly, six years after her accident, Sylvia has still spoken to no one of her inability to have intercourse except Peter, and she tells him, “I still find it difficult to accept that that part of my life is over.” When he, reasonably, points out that it need not be, she replies, “What most people are talking about, when they talk about sex … that’s not something I can do anymore. … So yes, in that sense, it is over.” People have expectations, she explains, that relationships will involve intercourse, and anyway, “You know, if I can’t do something properly, I don’t want to do it at all. … I think I would feel I was offering something very inferior.”
As a friend pointed out, by having Sylvia articulate these retrograde ideas, rather than having Peter reject her for not being able to (for instance) satisfy his sexual needs, Rooney attempts to validate them. If Sylvia, who is experiencing sexual loss and chronic pain, says she would rather have no sex than sex without a penis in her vagina, she must have some righteous ground to stand on. But in fact, everything Sylvia articulates in this passage is old-fashioned and, well, sexist. Sex with a woman, she claims, is “inferior” if it does not involve intercourse, and since non-normative (i.e., p-in-v) sex is not what “most people” consider to be sex, her experience of sexuality is now invalid. Yet as generations of feminists have pointed out, again and again, women — or people with female biology — do not primarily experience sexual pleasure through penetration but through clitoral stimulation. (Sylvia, who still masturbates, evidently knows this in practice if not intellectually.) Despite being conceived of and written by a woman, Sylvia represents an antiquated, male idea of female sexuality, defined by male pleasure and male biology. (Rooney, who was initially known as a queer writer upon the publication of Conversations with Friends, has apparently forgotten that lesbians exist.)
This would all be bad enough, but Rooney compounds it by indicating that becoming disabled (though how, we don’t exactly know) also means the end of sexuality for women. Sylvia’s fragile physical state and her inability to have (one specific form of) sex and inextricably linked in this novel. As Alexandra Harris, one of very few critics to remark upon this deeply disturbing dynamic, put it in The Guardian, “The end of her sexual life is cast, in some of the novel’s most troubling passages, as tantamount to death.” Though Sylvia is not literally dead, her disability and the (self-imposed) end of her sex life has rendered her somehow not quite alive, either. Instead, she acts as a noble saint watching over Peter’s life, only truly losing her temper with him after they do have sexual contact and he assumes that this means they will be in a relationship again.
Over the course of the novel, she tells him, “I just want you to remember me the way I was,” “If we had stayed together [after her accident], you would have ended up hating me,” and that the accident “ruined my life. … I’m not going to let it ruin yours.” The clear implication here is not only that Sylvia is semi-dead (“remember me as I was”) but also that being in a relationship with someone disabled, someone who is in chronic pain and cannot have intercourse, will inevitably lead to resentment, bitterness, and unhappiness. Ultimately, Peter, Sylvia, and Naomi wind up in a vague, semi-polyamorous agreement, but this doesn’t feel subversive; instead, it feels like a solution to Sylvia’s inability to fulfill Peter’s needs due to her seeming deficiency. Unsurprisingly, the two women get along seamlessly, united in their quest to love and adore Peter.
Disabled people have been fighting to combat the idea that we are undesirable for many years, but as Jessica Slice and Caroline Crupp point out in their excellent and practical guide Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down While Chronically Ill and Disabled, part of the ongoing problem is that popular culture and media rarely portray disabled people in happy or functional relationships. I don’t think it’s Sally Rooney’s job to do this work, but I do think it’s her responsibility not to disseminate toxic tropes that have been around for centuries. Reading Intermezzo, I was reminded of Victorian novels in which an invalid woman refuses to marry a loving man because she doesn’t want to drag him down. In the last 150 years, we should have moved on from these storylines.
I can believe that a professor of English, upon suddenly becoming disabled, would struggle with her self-image and self worth, but in the six years following her accident, I also believe that she would become well-versed in disability studies and theory, read memoirs by disabled people, befriend other disabled people, and probably also come to a broader understanding of her sex life. I feel confident in saying this because I’m sitting next to one of my bookshelves as I type this and I can see my multiple shelves of disability books that I’ve ravenously consumed in the two years since I’ve become severely ill, and I’m not even a professor. A book about a woman going through this experience is a book I’d be interested in reading. It’s clear, though, that Rooney didn’t think this through, and that her editors didn’t either. As ever, I remain hopeful that in the future, we’ll see more novels with more nuanced approaches to this subject matter, and fewer dehumanizing examples of this type.