We Were Never Meant to Be Neoliberal: Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and the Longhouse of Softboy Ireland
This essay was originally featured on Sophie’s Substack.
Word count: 1,300 words
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Summary: Sophie on post-Catholic malaise in Sally Rooney’s ‘Intermezzo’
There’s something deeply funny about Ireland becoming sexy. We weren’t built for it. You can tell we’re not comfortable. The minute Hozier hit the Billboard charts and Phoebe Bridgers started haunting Dalkey like a sad ghost in Converse, it all went sideways. Barry Keoghan got Dior. Paul Mescal got Phoebe. And somewhere between Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Aftersun, the Irish softboy stopped being a national embarrassment and became a global export. We went from awkward GAA lads in O’Neill’s tracksuits to being re-blogged on moody Tumblr blogs in a matter of years.
So, naturally, Intermezzo is a vibe shift.
It’s Rooney’s most emotionally repressed novel to date, and that’s a compliment. It’s as if she saw the Vogue photoshoots, the Mescal thirst tweets, the “Ireland is the new Brooklyn” discourse, and said: absolutely not. Instead, she gave us Peter and Ivan—two emotionally constipated brothers from Mayo who hate each other in a very Catholic way. And Margaret, who just wants to be loved but settles for being... arranged around. It’s less of a romance and more of an autopsy—on family, intimacy, and whatever’s left of Irish collective life after the recession.
This isn’t romantic. It’s Irish.
I. We’re All Margaret (Unfortunately)
Margaret is what happens when you’ve read Capitalist Realism but still sleep in your ex’s hoodie. She’s soft, porous, insecure in that “maybe I’m the problem” way, and tragically willing to let men monologue at her for six pages. She’s also, somehow, the most relatable Rooney girl yet. If Marianne was tortured and Frances was too cool to feel, Margaret is just... tired. She feels like the kind of person who ghostwrote a Notes app apology for a man she once dated.
Take this scene, post-coital:
"Margaret closed her eyes. She could feel her body beneath her like a thing that had been dragged across a floor. She wasn't sad. She wasn't anything. She said: do whatever you want."
When she lets Peter do "whatever he wants" to her, it’s not empowerment or kink—it’s just Thursday. Sex in Intermezzo is bleak, but not in a sad girl Tumblr way. It’s bleak in the way Irish sex actually is: rushed, emotionally fraught, and happening in a room where someone once died. Or at the very least, where a cousin passed out at Christmas and no one ever really cleaned properly afterward.
Rooney doesn’t sensationalise Margaret’s submission; she just shows it. It’s a politics of longing, but also of coping. Submission here is less about sex and more about housing insecurity. Margaret is not a femme fatale. She’s a woman trying to hold it together on a salary that wouldn’t cover half the rent in Harold’s Cross.
II. Irish Softboys as Late-Capitalist Collapse Aesthetic
Ivan and Peter are archetypes, but not in a literary way—in a “you’ve been on three Hinge dates with each” kind of way. Peter is the emotionally distant spreadsheet guy who says he’s a feminist but “doesn’t really do labels.” Ivan is the working-class sad boy who reads Fanon on Reddit and wants you to know he’d never cross a picket. (He would. He just wouldn’t tell you.) One works in data, the other rides a bike and calls it praxis.
Peter's financial flex is almost parody:
"Fifty-five thou. That’s what I made last quarter. And it means absolutely nothing. I live in a flat where the kitchen light buzzes like a nervous breakdown."
In lesser hands, they’d be cringe. But Rooney treats them like artifacts. Not quite critique, not quite endorsement—more like a sociological moodboard of Irish masculinity in crisis. They are, in a word, post-Hozier. Still damaged, but no longer poetic about it. They know they're disappointing. They've just accepted it.
And the novel knows this. It doesn’t try to fix them. It just lets them fail. Rooney understands that for a generation of Irish men raised on Catholic guilt and neoliberal precarity, being emotionally unavailable is the closest thing they’ll get to autonomy. There’s something tender in how she observes this failure—not with scorn, but with a quiet resignation. As if to say: we all know a Peter. And worse, we’ve all loved one.
III. Dublin, or: God Is Dead But Still Rents a Flat in Phibsborough
There’s a spiritual hunger beneath Intermezzo that feels distinctly post-Catholic. No one in the novel believes in God, but you can tell they wish they did. Dublin is not a city—it’s a purgatory with oat milk. It’s the kind of place where you pay €1,600 a month to stare at mold and call it character.
Rooney’s characters mourn their own alienation like it’s a lost dog. They miss solidarity, but they also miss meaning. The Freeman Library is falling apart. The pubs are full of freelancers. The apartments are cold. Everything is broken—but tastefully. It’s the aestheticisation of despair, with good lighting. Every sentence is framed like a poem, but it still reeks of damp.
You can feel the longing for a pre-neoliberal Ireland—where sociality, shame, and tradition structured desire. Not in a trad way (no one’s putting on a veil), but in the sense that everyone seems vaguely haunted by the absence of rules. No one knows how to love, or fight, or even argue properly. All they know is that they’re tired, online, and really need someone to split the rent with. The most intense emotion is often found in who left who on read.
Rooney’s genius is that she doesn’t try to rescue Ireland from this condition. She just sits in the mess and documents it, beautifully. There’s a stubborn fidelity to the mundane here—flat whites, awkward silences, passive-aggressive texts—that speaks to a deeper melancholy. It’s not despair. It’s recognition.
IV. Rooney Would Absolutely Be a Crypto-Catholic (And That’s a Compliment)
Let’s be honest: Sally Rooney gives major dark-left energy. She’s anti-capitalist, culturally Catholic, aesthetically austere, and vaguely allergic to joy. Intermezzo feels like it was written by someone who listened to Dasha from red scare talk about love as submission, nodded once, then stared out a rain-covered Trinity window for two hours. She doesn’t parody trad aesthetics—she reappropriates their gravity for the secularly heartbroken.
The book isn’t quite trad, but it gets the appeal. It understands that, in a world where liberation has been flattened into branding, shame and restraint can start to look like freedom. Margaret isn’t liberated—she’s trapped. But she knows it. And that self-awareness is the real politics of the book: not a call to arms, but a kind of quiet resistance to the aesthetic of self-actualisation that capitalism demands of women.
Rooney is the kind of Marxist who understands that sometimes the most radical act is to describe things exactly as they are. She doesn’t reach for utopias. She just sketches the damage. And in doing so, she maps out the real terrain of millennial life: not revolutions, but compromises. Not heroes, but people who apologise too much.
Final Confession
Intermezzo is Rooney’s best novel since Conversations, but it’s also her saddest. Not because people are crying (they’re not), or because love fails (it barely starts), but because it captures the core problem of Irish millennial life: we got everything we were promised—liberalism, sex, hot Irish boys—and it still didn’t fix us
We’re nostalgic for a country we were told to forget. Not the Church, not the shame—but the structure. The sense that you were part of something, even if it was oppressive. Now, we have freedom, but no form. And Rooney’s genius is that she doesn’t try to solve this. She just writes it down, beautifully.
In a sea of novels pretending everything is fine, Rooney gives us one that dares to say: maybe it’s not. Maybe the real tragedy isn’t that we’re unhappy, but that we’ve forgotten how to even want more. Maybe being Irish is just learning to carry the melancholy with grace—and make it look a little bit sexy.
Rating: 4.5 stars. Half a star off for making me want to watch reeling in the years... Full marks for emotional damage and recognising the quiet dignity of despair.