Intermezzo, The Sisters K, Dostoevsky, And You

A review of Intermezzo (Sally Rooney) and The Sisters K (Maureen Sun) through Dostoevsky, along with some thoughts about reading the classics.

After reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov this summer, I’m seeing those boys everywhere. This month I read two contemporary books one right after the other that were directly inspired by it. First, The Sisters K by Maureen Sun, an explicit reworking of Dostoevsky. And second, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, less explicitly so.

There are so many reasons to read outside your century. The obvious ones tie into the reason to read anything at all:

1. Classics are usually good for a reason (reading for the pleasure of a good book)

2. Personal growth and knowledge (reading for vaguely moral reasons)

3. And sure, to look erudite and cool as hell—although it’s hard to imagine anyone committing to 900 pages to flex (we’re talking reading, merely owing the copy doesn’t count)

As Italo Calvino puts it in his essay, ‘Why Read the Classics’:

The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs) [...]

The reading of a classic ought to give us a surprise or two vis-à-vis the notion that we had of it. For this reason I can never sufficiently highly recommend the direct reading of the text itself, leaving aside the critical biography, commentaries, and interpretations as much as possible.

As a lover of contemporary fiction, reading “the classics” deepens the reading experience of everything that has come after them: it brings novels into sharper contrast in the long light of history. The Brothers Karamazov is at once a complex and charming novel¹ and a blueprint whose fingerprints are all over hundreds of books. Its echoes were suddenly loud and obvious.² Among those echoes are these two recently published contemporary—and substantially different—novels.

The Sisters K by Maureen Sun

The Sisters K reimagines the dynamics of the Russian classic in a contemporary Korean-American family. Eugene Kim is a despotic father to three daughters: Minah, Sarah, and Esther. As in the Dostoevsky original, the sisters’ repulsion for their father has driven them apart from one another. They are brought back together over the question of inheritance, as their father lies dying in New Jersey. Like the original, their story intersects with an illegitimate half-brother and a shared, morally pure love interest.

A notable element of Dostoevsky’s novel is how quickly we move through the characters’ childhoods. We learn the basic facts over four short chapters as background information rather than the origins of their personalities. Typical of a 19th-century novel, the brothers are defined by their soulful differences brought to light through their relationship to Christian morality.

On the other hand, The Sisters K is underscored by a more psychological understanding of character: the sisters' personalities are not innate moral characters, but the sum total of their experiences and a reflection of their childhoods.³ Their childhood is the starting point for both the novel and their lives. Their differing memories and experiences of their father’s cruelty and prosperity over the years are what drive them into action. They argue about it over and over again, unable to recover from it.

The sisters mirror their Dostoevsky counterparts: Mitya and Minah are the eldest and angriest—but where Mitya is impulsive, Minah is calculating. Reading them in parallel draws out the fact that Mitya’s rash actions are available to a son in a patriarchal society, but certainly not to a daughter. Dostoevsky’s Ivan is mirrored in Sarah: intellectuals who hide their desires and emotions behind a screen of logic. And finally, the youngest child Alyosha and Esther, the angelic youngest children, still capable of love without expectation of return. In Alyosha’s case, his innate goodness has drawn him to the church, whereas Esther is good because of her childhood: “She had been nourished with love under the care of her neighbors. She knew what it was to take care of someone in ways [her sisters] did not.”

Alyosha is explicitly Dostoevsky’s hero. The novel tells you this on the first page. In The Sisters K, I would argue that Sarah is the hero. The change in the middle child’s story arc underscores this: Ivan is effectively punished for his lack of Christian morality, drawn down into madness by realizing that he harbored a latent desire to kill his father,⁴ whereas Sarah seeks and finds transcendence, an escape from her isolation. She has the most affecting sections of the book and the most fully realized inner turmoil.

The Sisters K uses Dostoevky’s novel as the basis to examine the question: what do you do with your suffering, how do you live with it? Each sister’s misery is unique and they wield that misery against one another. It’s a misery bounded and informed by the modern world: the financial inheritance in question has real weight to the sisters’ credit and academic debt. Unlike the forlorn 19th-century quasi-aristocrats they are based on, these characters have to earn a living.

Another indication that Sarah is the hero: she’s read about those 19th-century aristocrats and rejects the easy way they frame suffering:

When Sarah discovered Russian novels in her youth, she’d told herself that suffering would make her better because it would make her wiser. [...] Suffering could lead to wisdom and grace; it could bear fruit. But the fruit ripened and rotted in the blink of an eye. The fruits of suffering withered from long suffering.

Minah longs for financial inheritance as a repayment for what she has suffered, but as Esther implores her: “You have to stop calculating what can’t be calculated. It’ll kill you.”

The novel works as a companion to the original, examining psychological questions as well as gender and class dynamics that underpin but are not addressed in it. It’s also a masterful novel in its own right, with beautiful sentences that can ring as clear as a bell. That said, the novel holds the reader at arm’s length, describing the emotions of its characters more than it makes you feel them. It is marketed as a family saga but it does not have the redemption or easy answers readers might expect from that genre. Like its predecessor, the resolution is not clear.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

One of this year’s biggest literary fiction releases, Intermezzo is much less explicitly drawn from Dostoevsky. At first, I thought I was just feeling a Karamazov hangover after reading The Sisters K, but in Rooney’s own words from an article on the 8 books she read that informed the book:

Intermezzo is about the fact that those who know us best can still understand us the least. This is the story of two brothers (not three!) whose father has recently died and who are living with the reverberations of that death. The father's death in Dostoevsky and Sun is the turning point for the novel; here it is the start.

Rooney puts you directly inside the mind of these two brothers at this pivotal moment. It’s impossible to talk about Intermezzo without commenting on how the story is told. Chapters switch neatly between the two brothers and the writing style varies with it. I went back and reminded myself that Rooney’s previous books did have regular (ie, normal and frequent) paragraph breaks—this does not.⁵

Peter is the elder, the “normal” one with legible markers of success: he is a well-liked and charismatic lawyer. His sections are told in short, chaotic sentences. It reads like being inside someone’s head, eschewing grammar by putting the focus of the sentence before the grammatical sentence, such as: “Smiling then painfully he feels himself.” We’re in a deluge of his psyche, stream-of-conscious style, in which it is unclear if something is spoken or just a thought.

Ivan is ten years younger, a semi-employed chess master who struggles to understand the nuances of human interaction. His sections are told in longer, meandering sentences, as Ivan dissects every movement around him. His chapters also switch between Ivan himself and his older lover, Margaret, a charming way of showing you how alike they are.

The contrast seems obvious: Peter seems put together but is not; Ivan seems like a mess but is not. It’s a way to make literal the novel’s themes of the impossible problem of truly understanding and knowing other people.

It is the more consciously writerly of the two contemporary novels. That is to say, The Sisters K has a structured story arc, laying out family dynamics like dominoes until the father’s death, which lets the dominoes fall. Intermezzo—and to be clear, this is probably one of my favourite books of the year—is a slow, cumulative reading experience. We start with one understanding of the brothers and their dynamics and come to understand the ways we as the reader misunderstood them as well. It slowly builds these men and their romantic lives, in parallel and in contrast, as one blossoms and the other unravels.

If Sisters K uses a psychological lens on the family saga, Intermezzo is mired in philosophy. In Rooney’s novel they are overwhelmed by the idea that they are the sum total of their experiences and psychology. They repeatedly ask how it is possible to connect one moment to another, to exist in relation to everything that has come before, all those past selves wanting two conflicting things at once. Alone after Ivan has left, Margaret asks: “Is there anything left of that now? And where? In that room, in the cold little bungalow with the damp curtains. Or in the contact between their two lives, touching.”

The father in this case is largely in the background, a shadow over the events of the novel as the brothers try to figure out what “moving on” means and how to calculate the sum of their lives. Neither has a clear answer, even if each thinks he is in the right. The brothers here feel each like an amalgamation of the rash, the intellectual, and the angelic Karamazovs. Like the brothers in Dostoevsky, they have to learn to understand one another to make it through.

Karamazov Redux

It’s impossible to revisit Dostoevsky without grappling with a core question in his book: is redemption and transformation even possible? I think each book has a different answer, but going too far into each book would count as a “spoiler” in the truest sense! Going back to the Calvino quote above: “I can never sufficiently highly recommend the direct reading of the text itself.” To overly simplify, one has a religious, another psychological, and another philosophical answer to that question. Choose your fighter!

Reading all of these books was a reminder that reading a classic is a self-replenishing reward, as you get to revisit them over and over again in all the works that come after. It’s the truest magic of reading and reading and reading. Hearing so many stories throughout your life, each distinct and unrelated, but connected through you and what you make of them together.

1. A brief summary: three brothers come together to settle a financial dispute with their father, a man who takes pleasure from cruelty. He steals one of his son’s girlfriends; and lords their inheritance over them as a game to see who will debase themselves for it. These are his lesser crimes.

The first two-thirds lays out a complicated web of family dynamics, including each person’s beliefs, philosophies, and desires. Then, Fyodor is murdered. The final third is the ramifications of that death, as every philosophy and desire set out in the preceding acts is tested to its breaking point.

2. Is it time to re-read Infinite Jest?

3. This is not to say that Dostoevksy’s characters are not psychologically complex!

4. Speaking of psychology… it goes without saying that Freud was feral for this book

5. In addition to Dostoevsky, this book is deeply and explicitly indebted to James Joyce. Having not read any Joyce I cannot hear the echoes as much as know they are there: stream of conscious writing, experiment in form, etc. Is it time to read Ulysses?