Intermezzo

I suffer from Dorothy Parker’s ‘congenital lowness of brow’ and am notorious in my book club for not finishing some of the titles we choose. Recent refusals include R.F. Kuang’s Babel and DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little. To this list I can now add Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. It takes work, hard work, to write sentences so clumsy and difficult to comprehend as this:

Other feelings he notices also as they wait together in the dim warmth of the restaurant for the man to bring their coats.

Or, taking it all up a notch:

She takes his arm. Her fine small hand almost weightless. Fingers in the creases of his jacket. Were you seeing Naomi earlier? How is she? Good. Yeah. Walking up towards Dane Street again. You like her? I do. 

At times I thought I was reading a book written with WhatsApp. Minus the emojis. It's jammed with long – sometimes page-long – paragraphs of dialogue and description all jumbled together, with minimal punctuation to help the reader get it all into some semblance of order in able to understand what is actually being said. No quotation marks to indicate dialogue. (Although I know that’s an old one dating back, if I’m right, to Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man.) 

This is text for the reader to sit and puzzle over, pen and paper close by so they can take notes and marvel at the intricacy of the prose and the subtlety with which interior states can be illustrated and alluded to. This is writing as homework.

Yes, I didn’t finish this book. I didn’t even try to finish it. So take me out and shoot me, on a charge of Outrageous Philistinism, which is an offence contrary to Literary Appreciation. But I have only a few more years left to live, and I really can’t be bothered to waste them wading through such interminably – and seemingly intentionally – dense verbal thickets.