Sally Rooney is the closest thing there is to a star millennial novelist writing today. When I wrote about her Normal People a few years ago I focused on her chops as an author for my generation, one who talked to my own lived experience in prose that also reached beyond the present moment. Her latest work, Intermezzo, still does that. But while it contains the hallmarks of Rooney’s past novels, Intermezzo feels like a step into a new phase of writing life, exactly the sort of progression the dawning knowledge of her writing would imply.

Intermezzo tells of two Irish brothers living in Dublin. Peter is in his thirties, a lawyer driven to both public service and private drama, torn between a longtime love interest with some scars and a new fling with a college girl. Ivan is a chess prodigy just out of college, short on social graces and stumbling into something with an older woman. Their father has just passed, and neither is close with their mother, long divorced from the late dad.  These two heady young men are often stuck in their own brains and so we go on journeys with them, backward and forward as they dwell and process and then stumble through their complex interactions. Peter’s chapters have a staccato prose, the clipped thoughts of a culturally savvy lawyer firing through his thoughts, his debater’s instinct caked into his very being. Ivan, meanwhile, drifts on through, less precise but perhaps settling into a more stable inner peace.

Rooney is in her thirties now, and some of her characters have aged with her. While she still mines that fumbling twentysomething phase of life that birthed her writing career for more material, she has expanded her reach into another stage, that intermezzo somewhere between youth and middle age. Juxtaposing Peter and Ivan lets her show how the passage of time affects people. There is a tension here between youthful hope and older knowingness, between the buffeting forces of first loves and the steady attrition of passion that can plague later ones. The sex feels rawer, the intimacy more strained, the mental struggle more all-encompassing, not just a phase but a lifelong struggle to find a course.

There is an undercurrent of a radical existentialism beneath Rooney’s writing, one that I am coming to recognize as a fundamental faith that I share. She begins the novel with an epigraph from Wittgenstein, a founder of the whole line of thought. Her words also evoke Hannah Arendt, who saw in human relations the foundations of all achievement, and perhaps José Ortega y Gasset, who was explaining that we do not fall out of coconut trees long before the sentiment became political pop philosophy. While Rooney’s characters are smart people capable of holding court on such topics, that is not how she guides her stories forward.

Everything about Rooney’s prose drives home the existential stakes: the lack of extraneous detail, places defined but time left fluid. There are no acts of history or outside forces in a Rooney novel, few plot devices because there really isn’t all that much plot. She simply creates characters and has them collide with one another and that is all it takes for a great drama to ensue. In its spareness, Rooney’s writing makes the stakes clear: she has something to say about what we are all doing here, and how our interactions with flawed, scarred people will define both our triumphs and our failures. Consider this passage told from the lens of Ivan’s lover, Margaret, as they appear in public for the first time as a couple:

On the way back, they stop at an old country hotel in Knocknagarry. Margaret doesn’t think anyone will see them, it’s too unlikely, there’s no use being paranoid. And indeed, when they enter, the dining room is almost empty: a young family near the entrance, an elderly couple by the closed piano. Margaret and Ivan are shown to a small table, set with white linen, heavy silverware, a lighted wax candle. In her exhausted satisfaction after swimming, she smiles at him without speaking, and he smiles back. They order, the waitress brings their food, and they eat. When Margaret rests her arm on the tabletop, Ivan reaches over and touches the back of her hand lightly with his fingertips. No one else takes any notice, the staff, the elderly couple, the young family with their noisy children, and why should they. Margaret is reminded of the way she felt when she first met Ivan: as if life had slipped free of its netting. As if the netting itself had all along been an illusion, nothing real. An idea, which could not contain or describe the borderless all-enveloping reality of life. Now, in her satisfied exhaustion, with her hand resting on the white linen tablecloth, the touch of Ivan’s fingertips, the candle dripping a slow thread of wax down its side, the glossy closed lid of the piano, Margaret feels that she can perceive the miraculous beauty of life itself, lived only once and then gone forever, the bloom of a perfect and impermanent flower, never to be retrieved. This is life, the experience, this is all there has ever been. To force this moment into contact with her ordinary existence only seems to reveal how constricting, how misshapen her ideas of life have been before.

The scene is mesmerizing: the easy prose, the home evoked by this creaky old hotel on a bleak Irish day, the simple touches that give Margaret meaning to overpower every other earthly worry. Of course life is not this smooth, but the glimmers when it find this rhythm make everything else worth it. Later, Ivan and Margaret’s secret fling slips into the open:

They hang up. Margaret rises from the table, turns the lights on, fills the kettle. Rushing sound of the tap. Her reflection dim and bubbled in the dark window glass. Gradually these situations arise, she can see that now, just one step after another, and by the time a few weeks or months have passed, your life is no longer recognisable. You are lying to almost everyone you know. You have come to care too passionately, too fully and completely, for an unsuitable person. You can no longer visualise your own future: not only five years from now, but five months, even five weeks. Everything is in disarray. All this for one person, for the relation that exists between you. Your fidelity to the idea of that relation. In the light of that, you have come to hold too loosely too many other important things: the respect of your family, the admiration of your colleagues and acquaintances, even the understanding of your closest friends. Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting. There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in places, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgment, reproval, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another. Because of Margaret’s friends, her former marriage, her family, colleagues, people in town, she is not entirely free to live the spontaneous life that she has imagined for herself. But because of Ivan, because of whatever there is between them, she is, on the other hand, not entirely free to return to her previous existence either. The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.

Ivan and Margaret’s romance, while freighted with challenges, is the simple one. Peter’s mental descent as he negotiates his two live interests requires an even deeper reach and struggle that I could quote at length, but I will instead just encourage people to read the book. In Peter’s search, supplemented by Ivan’s parallel journey, we see deeper questions of what love can be, some tentative questions about faith, a path toward hope through deep anguish. That tale is not quite complete, but it is enough to go along for the journey through this intermezzo stage of life. It is also a hearty reminder that there are things novels can do that no other art form can. Keep weaving that netting, Sally Rooney, and showing us more and more of life.