Full of friends and lovers and heady conversations on contemporary life’s many woes and injustices, Sally Rooney’s novels have made her a generational novelist: Hers are the stories of millennials, set to sea, in a world of uncertainty, economic and political upheaval, and interpersonal confusion. Her new novel, Intermezzo, centered around two brothers, grieving a lost parents, and struggling to form families of their own, picks up on many of these themes. But as Jess Bergman writes in an essay for the October issue of The Nation, it takes a different approach. Formalistically more experimental, focused far more on action than on ideas, Intermezzo follows these brothers as they attempt to put their principles into practice. “Rooney’s previous novels,” Bergman observes, “were often criticized for the way her characters spent almost all of their time hand-wringing over the gap between their passion for equality, justice, and redistributive economic policies and their comfortable bourgeois lives.” But in Intermezzo, “this dilemma is mostly put to the side, and instead we get characters acting out their political commitments.” Read “Sally Rooney’s Open Question”