Peter has a good deal to say about the suit his brother wore to their father's funeral. He can account for its ugliness, imagine where Ivan bought it, and fit the whole thing into a familiar picture of the younger man's indifference to appearances. Then Naomi asks how Ivan is doing. Peter admits that he has no idea.

That small failure of knowledge, in the publisher's opening extract, makes an inviting entrance to Sally Rooney's fourth novel. Before asking what Intermezzo has to say about grief or love, we might stay with this brother: observant, articulate, affectionate in ways he cannot quite manage, and wrong to suppose that observation has brought him close.

You need not have read Normal People, or have settled an opinion about Rooney, to enter here. The immediate situation is easy enough to grasp. A father has died. His two adult sons are living through the aftermath, alongside three women whose lives are entangled with theirs. Knowing the relationships takes a moment. Understanding what anyone wants from them will take longer.

The interesting delay is between those two kinds of knowledge. We may have decided what a gesture means before the next paragraph lets us hear the hesitation behind it. Someone who seemed obvious a moment ago becomes troublesome again.

Your brother has already been cast

Peter is thirty-two, a lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is twenty-two, a competitive chess player. One looks fluent in adult life; the other is visibly uncomfortable with much of it. A ten-year age gap gives each brother plenty of material for a misleading story.

This happens in families with a peculiar ease. The younger child remains the younger child long after he has grown up. The older one's confidence becomes evidence that he needs no help. Shared history can make an interpretation feel exempt from checking: I was there, I remember, I know what you're like. At some point, a description stops being information and starts assigning a part.

Peter's professional competence does not keep him steady after the funeral. The publisher's account tells us that he is taking medication to sleep. Ivan's chess ability, meanwhile, does not settle what kind of future he can expect. In her interview with Cressida Leyshon, Rooney cautions against treating Ivan as an undiscovered world champion. He is talented; his talent does not promise that sort of destiny.

Neither intelligence nor a respectable occupation releases someone from the difficulty of living. That is easy to accept in the abstract and surprisingly hard to remember when a clever person we love makes a mess. Surely he should have worked this out. Surely, with his advantages, he could do better.

Bereavement gives the brothers a common event without giving them a common way of speaking. It is tempting to award maturity to the one who seems more composed, or sincerity to the one who seems less socially polished. The opening suggests that both verdicts would be premature. A person's manner is something we encounter. His grief is not necessarily available in it.

Intimacy travels at different speeds

Peter is involved with Naomi, a university student, while remaining deeply attached to Sylvia, his former partner, whose life has been changed by an accident and chronic pain. Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman working at an arts centre, whose own marriage has become a source of difficulty. The relationships begin with histories already attached.

Peter and Naomi's first scene offers a particularly sharp detail. They are physically comfortable with each other; money passes between them; yet she has only just learned that his father has died. Their closeness has developed unevenly. Bodies, practical help, family news, and public recognition have reached different places.

It would be possible to read this merely as an indictment of Peter. But the scene makes room for a more uncomfortable question: how often do people find themselves living inside an arrangement they have never quite described? A private habit acquires rules. Certain questions remain unasked. One person treats a limit as obvious while the other has not agreed to it.

Naomi can answer back. Her jokes also make Peter's account of their relationship harder to sustain without embarrassment. Listening to her means noticing more than the effect she has on his mood. She has been managing days about which he knows little, just as he has been withholding news that would have mattered to her.

The publicly available “Opening Theory” offers a different beginning. Margaret expects the visiting chess prodigy to be a child. Ivan arrives, unmistakably grown, and the encounter has already escaped her expectation before either of them has done much.

Ivan is attracted to her and anxious about mistaking professional friendliness for personal interest. His silence is busy. From outside, he might simply look awkward; from within, a brief pause contains an elaborate effort to avoid presuming too much.

There is something touching about that effort, and something recognisable. Being careful with another person can leave us unable to tell whether we are being considerate or retreating. Margaret has a job to do. Ivan would like the conversation to mean something beyond it. No amount of skill at chess will establish what her next response ought to mean.

The age differences invite comparison: an older man with a younger woman, a younger man with an older woman. Our reactions may not be symmetrical. Financial security, experience, and familiar gender expectations can influence what we call plausible, troubling, or romantic. The fact that everyone is an adult begins that discussion; it does not finish it.

Before a thought becomes a sentence

One useful way to decide whether this book is for you is to compare the two available extracts. Peter's opening moves in short bursts, doubling back through impressions, judgments, and memories. “Opening Theory” gives hesitation a more patient unfolding. These are different reading rhythms, not simply two sets of biographical facts.

Peter's quickness may initially feel like an advantage. He has language for what he notices. Then the fragments start to reveal the strain of maintaining that assurance. We enter a mind already in motion, without a neat introduction to every change of direction. Understanding may arrive a beat after the sentence.

Ivan gives another kind of work to the reader. His attempts to understand a social exchange can linger over something another person would barely register. A pause in conversation becomes an event because of what might be misread inside it. The interest lies partly in watching him prepare an answer, then discover that preparing it has not made speaking easy.

Rosie Ofori Ward's ABC review describes the contrast between Peter's fractured movement and Ivan's more deliberate thinking, and notes Margaret's separate perspective. Her response to the novel's slower pace is largely appreciative. Curtis Yee, in his Associated Press review, singles out Rooney's ability to catch feelings that have not yet become entirely legible to the people experiencing them.

Those accounts point to a pleasure visible in the extracts: the interval before somebody can give a feeling its name. We often talk as if emotions arrive with clear instructions. In ordinary life, we may know only that a conversation has unsettled us. Explanation comes afterward, sometimes in a form that is convenient rather than convincing.

Rooney's dialogue also goes without the conventional enclosure of quotation marks. Speech and inward thought sit close together. A reader who occasionally goes back to establish whether something was spoken has not necessarily lost the thread; identifying the shift is part of attending to the voice. It can help to read through a scene before returning to its smaller movements.

This is also a fair warning about pace. If you want a novel driven chiefly by escalating external events, try a few pages before committing. A conversation reconsidered can be gripping, but a taste for that kind of attention cannot be supplied by critical praise. The extracts let you make the decision in the company of Rooney's actual sentences.

How much life does a supporting character get?

There is a second reason to keep the reviews close without allowing them to decide the reading. Their disagreements can sharpen a question.

Ward finds depth in the novel's slower movement, while also noticing how Sylvia and Naomi reach us through Peter's constricted view. In a substantially less favourable review for America, Robert Rubsam argues that too much of the significant conflict belongs to the characters' pasts, leaving their present encounters insufficiently dramatic. He is particularly dissatisfied with the space afforded Sylvia's independent life.

The disagreement matters more than a score. A mind returning to an old hurt can be the substance of a novel, or it can become a substitute for present action. Which is happening may vary from scene to scene. A reader does not have to take a permanent side before opening the book.

The question about the women deserves similar care. A character without an independent viewpoint can still have a vivid life. Equally, a novel about understanding people has not automatically understood everyone it contains. When Sylvia or Naomi appears, how much can we discover about her own concerns? How much of what we hear remains organised around Peter's need for her?

This is a question to carry into the full novel, rather than a verdict drawn from a sample. It also asks something of our appetite as readers. We may want a woman to comfort a man, tell him the truth, or finally make him change. She can do any of those things and still have a day to live after leaving his company. Are we curious about that day?

The suit was easy

Peter can remember what Ivan wore. Remembering does not tell him what to ask.

That seems a useful place to leave the introduction, with a difficulty smaller than the grand question of whether love can save us. Once we have known someone for years, can we still hear information that does not fit? Can an older brother allow the younger one to have changed without asking him to demonstrate it according to the family's established rules?

Those questions need not lead to limitless patience. A person can be misunderstood and still behave badly; understanding more does not cancel the effects of what he does. It may, however, change the conversation we are able to have with him. The familiar explanation loses some of its authority. Another question becomes possible.

Start with Peter if you want to hear a confident voice giving itself away. Start with Ivan and Margaret if you want to sit inside the uncertainty of an encounter before anyone knows what it will become. The two extracts offer enough to discover whether you want to stay.

Their father is gone. There are still messages to answer, people to see, words that came out wrongly. Peter has a brother whose suit he can describe and whose days he has not yet learned to ask about.