It would have been easy, a book or two ago, to blame it on age or circumstance: young writer, whiz kid, former debate champion, writes the same characters over and over, likely loosely based on her or her friends. I wouldn’t have cared for that, but it would have made sense, an excuse for why the novels kept more or less moving around the same sets of interpersonal dynamics without ever saying anything quite real about them. If that were true, it would have also followed that she’d grow out of it. Life happens to everyone, eventually, even writers with bestselling novels turned into Hulu/BBC shows. And then they, her characters, would have also grown out of it. But Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, is populated with people we’ve met before.

There’s the discontented man in his thirties engaged in bad behavior: Peter, a barrister with “ideals,” frustrated by and simultaneously covetous of his colleagues’ wealthy lifestyles, torn between his abiding affection for his longtime love Sylvia and his unbridled lust for his decade-younger hot-girl lover Naomi, all while mourning the death of his father. (This is also, more or less, Nick, an actor living in the shadow of his more-successful wife who embarks on an affair with the much younger Frances, in Conversations with Friends; and Simon, an advisor for a vaguely lefty government group in Beautiful World, Where Are You, torn between his desire for his longtime love interest Eileen and his devout Catholicism.)

There is a woman in her thirties whose tenuously settled adult life rests on some bargaining away of a fantasy: Margaret, a worker at a rural arts center who becomes paramour to Peter’s younger brother Ivan. (Conversations with Friends’s Melissa, who through gritted teeth accepts and even incorporates into her worldview her husband’s affair; Connell’s mother Lorraine in Normal People, more akin to a saint than a human; and aspiring-writer-turned-editor Eileen in Beautiful World.)

There is the troubled, working-class young man, sometimes misunderstood but ultimately good — it’s very important we know he’s good — if not in fact a genius: Ivan, also mourning his father, resentful of and victimized (if mostly indirectly) by his normatively successful, good-looking (but not so good) brother. (This archetype comprises Normal People’s brilliant writer Connell, as well as warehouse worker Felix in Beautiful World.)

There is a sick woman, haunted and victimized by her own body and mind, whose sexuality, conditioned by her physical and mental limits, is the subject of close scrutiny as well as the source of relational tension with a man: Sylvia, Peter’s once-girlfriend, now-friend who ended their relationship after an accident rendered her incapable of having sex. (Frances in Conversations with Friends, whose affair with Nick is sometimes made less than steamy by her endometriosis; Marianne in Normal People, who first endures violence from her family and then seeks it out from her lovers; and Alice in Beautiful World, who at the start of the novel is just getting out of the hospital after a nervous breakdown.)

And there is a young woman, often brazen, sometimes bordering on precarity but ultimately somehow always landing on her feet: Naomi, Peter’s twenty-three-year-old girlfriend who, we are led through heavy insinuation to understand, once sold nudes on the internet, is illegally squatting a building in Dublin until she and her friends get kicked out in a police raid, and is so beautiful people trip over themselves when they see her. (See: Bobbi in Conversations with Friends.)

Certain dynamics appear repeatedly: a woman experiencing a mixture of jealousy of and admiration toward another woman; a man being torn between his feelings for a woman and some other aspiration, which might just be a relationship with a different woman; characters of any gender feeling ill at ease around people from a different socioeconomic class than them. This is the stuff with which Rooney has come to be concerned: the predictable, even scripted, behaviors that people fall into as a result of the social categories they are assigned: class, sure, but especially and above all, gender.

While Intermezzo is fairly narrowly focused on those behaviors, it is also more lavish than Rooney’s past work: longer, with more stylistic variation. The close third-person narration that tracks Peter is staccato and frenzied; Ivan is cooler and almost funny; Margaret is slow and deliberate. There are certain indulgences: seven instances of a woman being likened to a flower, five of someone’s breath “catching” while getting turned on, and two inadvisably proximate descriptions of breasts under cashmere. There’s an ambient feeling to much of the action, and it doesn’t really matter what happens or what anyone does; you can intuit the end before you’re even halfway through. The most compelling moments of tension arise in the handful of scenes involving Ivan, Peter, and their mother, but Rooney almost methodically avoids exploring the family drama, always leading the narration back to the love affairs.

We might read that choice as a clever mirroring of the brothers’ own avoidance of their grief. We might also take it at face value and conclude that Rooney is simply interested in romance more than anything else. After all, all of her novels have revolved around romantic tension and erotic desire; the question at the heart of it all has always been “Will they?” and the answer has always ended up being “yes.” In the first two novels, the material context of the characters’ lives (their income, their housing situations, their jobs or lack thereof) conditioned the journey of getting to that yes, which is how Rooney has held on to the title of “Marxist novelist,” even though what seems closer to the truth (and what Rooney herself says) is that she is a Marxist who, separately, writes novels. In Beautiful World, that context was there but fell away suddenly, by plot contrivances and/or magic. In Intermezzo, it falls away too, and mercifully for those of us who have been eager to nail down Rooney’s conviction, the mechanism by which that happens is clearer: the men accept their need to give love, and the women accept their need to receive it.

This is why the most salient, repeated, and consequential interpersonal dynamic in all of Rooney’s work, the event around which everything else revolves and that makes all of the pieces of the story snap into place, is a woman telling a man he can do whatever he wants to her. Multiple scenes in Intermezzo featuring Naomi in Peter’s apartment, “begging to be fucked,” asking him to hit her, bring to mind Marianne expressing essentially the same thing to Connell and Frances to Nick. Connell is uneasy in that situation (he’s one of the good guys, remember), and so is Nick, but Peter doesn’t balk at all; in fact, he likes Naomi’s submission. He fantasizes about getting her pregnant so he can “take her around town” and show off what he “did to her.” On a drunken, hopeless night walk home, he thinks: “And if she’s in a good mood they could even go to bed. Hurt her, make her cry, why not.” Naomi, of course, has in an earlier scene already consented:

You can do whatever you want with me, she says. Anything you want, you can do. . . . You can do anything you want, she repeats. And he could, he thinks. Turn her face-down, hurt her a little, make her take it, tell him how it feels. Degrading. Shock her out of thinking about anything else.

Naomi is ten years younger than Peter, but her consuming dependency on him is not a product of her age or life circumstances but of something that Rooney depicts as more immutable: her gender. We need only look at Margaret, who is ten years older than her lover Ivan and yet needs his love with the same intensity, to surmise this: “You need that, he repeated. You need me to love you? Inside her an opening unfurling sensation, hot, tender, and she was nodding her head.”

All the women need from the men is love — or rather, all the women need is love from men. Sylvia, with her debilitating chronic pain and teaching commitments, is contented by Peter getting her prescriptions and washing her vomit bucket. As long as Naomi can keep Peter sexually interested in her, she can have a place to live. And Margaret, with the threat of harassment from her alcoholic almost-ex-husband always looming and her small-town reputation to protect, can’t help but let her worries melt away when she’s in Ivan’s arms.

The men, meanwhile, are somewhat more complicated. Peter chafes at his job and resents his coworkers. Ivan is haunted by his past as a chess prodigy and believes himself a failure. Peter loves fucking Naomi but can’t stop thinking about how other men have paid for pornographic images of her. In Sylvia, he finds a woman who he can love without the psychic disturbance of sexual activity. Peter wants it both ways, and with almost no resistance, the women let him have it: his Madonna-whore complex is satisfied in the form of a throuple, and his employment-related troubles never come up again. Ivan, who we learn once thought feminism was evil and women made up lies about being raped, seems to exhibit none of that incel mentality once Margaret gives in to his advances. What’s more, reinvigorated by their relationship, he resumes his once-dormant quest to receive the second-highest chess title of International Master.

The men need to give and the women need to receive. (Perhaps the neatest encapsulation of this idea is the late-in-the-game revelation that Sylvia can experience sexual pleasure; she just can’t have penetrative sex, which both she and Peter have interpreted to mean she can’t participate in coupled sexual activity at all.) Impediments to smooth sailing arise when characters refuse to accept their assigned role and act accordingly. By the end, everyone does; all is well.

Intermezzo’s characters feel familiar because we’ve seen them before; they are the archetypes to which Rooney has made men and women reducible. But they also feel familiar, alarmingly so, despite all their talk of climate change and social justice, because they are almost indistinguishable from the chads and trad wives of our particularly gender-troubled moment, as well as from generations of men and women bound to each other by the idea that it all works out in the end as long as the woman submits. Feminists fought hard against that notion, but its simplicity seems too tempting.

I can forgive it in the scores of people who see no other way out, but it’s harder to swallow from a novelist whose work has at times been interpreted as social critique. The lives of entire generations of people have been made temporarily bearable and then, ultimately, hallucinatorily tragic by their acceptance of the same premise on which Intermezzo’s placid ending rests: that men exist at the mercy of the world — and that women exist at the mercy of men.