Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but only half the story on men, April 18, 2004
"Intimacy" is rightly valued for its dispassionate presentation of the duplicity and selfishness of men in love. Intimacy is both the goal and destroyer of monogamy, Kureishi seems to being saying, and he certainly pulls no punches when it comes to explaining why. Men always want someone else. Blame nature, blame nurture, blame contemporary social demands incompatible with six hundred millennia of evolutionary development. Whatever the case, we seem to be programmed to break women's hearts and to ruin our own happiness in the process. Kureishi gives an agonizingly candid insight into the machinations of male ego and self-justification. My problem with it is that many happily married men would probably say, "Speak for yourself, Hanif." And rightly so. What of the men who live perfectly happy lives devoted to their wives and children? It doesn't mean they aren't attracted to other women, it doesn't mean they don't ever think of straying. It just means they don't go through with it. Are they all repressed? Are they all kidding themselves? Do they secretly hate their wives and resent their children? Or have they learned that the infantile fantasy of endlessly variable sexual experience is precisely that, and therefore not worth pursuing? Kureishi doesn't seem to allow that such men might exist. He tells only half the story on men, and so this tragi-comic articulation of male infidelity comes very close to celebrating it as natural, inevitable and therefore of little consequence. I'm not taking the moral high ground here. I'm just acknowledging what Kureishi refuses to: that some men aren't cheating dogs. My only other quibble is that this novel is too long, even at 120 pages. It wouldn't seem that way if I hadn't previously read an exquisitely edited extract, published as a short story in The New Yorker, which said everything the novel says, but better. It was less totalizing, less cockily assured of its own position - and therefore closer to the truth. (It's still available in "The Art Of The Story", edited by Daniel Halpern - a collection well worth a look.)
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Houdini making things smug before his escape, June 18, 2005
I can still so clearly remember the afternoon I first read the Hanif Kureishi story that became INTIMACY---in the New Yorker in 1997 or 1998---and how I was so elated by it that I phoned an editor friend in another city who, like me, was a single mother whose children were officially grown up (but still trying to grow up) just as we were two women who were officially grown up (but still trying to grow up) and although we both belonged to a category of readers who should despise this book (women who've sometimes had a rough time in their relationships with sexually charismatic men) we just couldn't stop talking about it and singing its praises. But we didn't have to want a man like this in our lives (not any more, we didn't) to value that kind of man's incarnation as a character in an extraordinary novel.
It's true that when INTIMACY was first published in Britain, it ignited a firestorm in both Kureishi's family and in the press, with one of its many critics denouncing it as "this short, odious book." And it's also true that INTIMACY'S narrator, Jay (a scriptwriter) is wilful, childish, narcissistic and wild. And, yes, odious too; he even does the occasional parent-teacher interview in his "latest favourite suit, on acid" and even though he's the father of very young children he keeps Ecstasy, LSD, and an old bottle of amyl nitrate in the fridge. But he's also a man who is tender, introspective, witty, and exuberantly honest. Herein lies the book's reckless charm and elating momentum.
INTIMACY also joins a long line of 20th-century novels that tell the story of men leaving home, beginning with the husband in John Updike's Too Far to Go, a man who, before leaving his wife and children, repairs hinges and latches: "a Houdini making things snug before his escape..."
In novels by Richard Stern and Bernard Malamud and any number of other male writers on the theme of men who are also ambivalently on the run, the women being left behind are dark-haired, enduring, and sexually withholding, while the mistresses are fair-haired, adoring, and quick to offer sexual comfort. These blondes travel with a vast array of cosmetic and herbal supplies; in the case of Jay's mistress Nina--a shrewdly wistful phantom forever kept off-stage in her pale, hippie clothes--it's a bag stocked with nipple cream, tapes of the sound of the sea, postcards of cats, packets of camomile tea, and other bits of the equipment so vital to "mobile girls."
"Soon we will be like strangers," Jay tells us, speaking of Susan, the mother of his children. But no, they can never be that. "Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history." Jay also fears dying--he's invited to more funerals than dinner parties--and so has little use for women who are also too quickly growing older, as he makes clear when he ironically asks what's wrong with maturity. "Think of the conversations I could have--about literature and bitterness--with a forty-year-old!"
Susan belongs in this age range, but in spite of his making her his muse by turning her (via metaphor) into a blank page--she's at the bottom of the stairs in her white T-shirt and white slippers, looking "so white I could write on her"--his evocations of her can also convey his love for her, as in the following scene when he's moved by her enthusiasm as she kisses their children: "When we really talk, it is about them, something they have said or done, as if they are a passion no one else can share or understand."
During his last night with his family, Jay experiences the outside world as both ominous and alluring. But mostly ominous: "Outside, the dark leaves on the trees flap in the wind like hundreds of long green tongues, the branches knocking at me." He dreads leaving his sons, two "fierce and ebullient" little boys who are never named--this is one of Kureishi's many brilliant strokes--two wild boys who careen through the novel, adding to both its anguish and its comedy.
Jay says of the three-year-old, "I wonder when I will sleep beside him again, if ever. He has a vicious kick and a tendency, at unexpected moments, to vomit in my hair. But he can pat and stroke my face like a lover. His affectionate words and little voice are God's breath to me." This has a parent's narcissism in it, true, but it's also incredibly tender. And yet in the incredibly skilfully abridged version of INTIMACY that appeared in The New Yorker, a few lines down from this adoring tribute Jay is on the threshold of his front door, the fresh wind sweeping through him as one of the more compelling of his inner voices commands, "Go. You must go."
This is where the novel should have ended, on page 92. It would have been a novella then, but it would have been the right thing to keep it emotionally and lyrically dynamic. Instead it goes on for another twenty-six pages, and the line that follows the powerful "Go. You must go," is almost criminally banal: "I am kicking over the traces." Along with a few other lacklustre passages, this is one of the relatively few disappointments in what is otherwise a vivid and fearless novel.
At times it's also as if the war between Jay's id and his superego has triggered a war in the syntax, which is sometimes formal and Victorian, sometimes the Kiplingesque English of Jay's father, sometimes London street slang.
But whatever its deficiencies, INTIMACY is an important and weirdly thrilling book, reminding us (as we occasionally do need reminding) how honourable that OTHER war is: the war between what's most worthy and what's most alive.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bitingly real, a sad account on the human nature of desire, May 14, 2001
By A Customer
This is a superbly written book, which portrays the thoughts and feelings of a middle-aged man who has exhausted his 10 year relationship with his wife. Anyone who reads this book for the explicit purpose of searching for answers in their own troubled relationships is not going to hit upon any big revelation or come to a closure of some sort. While this book may open some people's eyes as to "what men really want" (in my opinion, many women may feel the same way as the protagonist in the story), it is more importantly a tale on the condition of human nature. What everyone should realize is that human nature forever desires what it cannot have, and no person who lets his/her mind run amok like this will ever truly find "ideal" happiness. A person's life is not made up entirely of long stretches of happiness; in times of boredom and listlessness, one should realize and value what he/she possesses and be content with it. A good marriage is not defined by love alone; there is trust, responsibility and all those other un-exciting descriptions that must be there for two people to co-exist peacefully. We all desire to be loved and understood, but in the end, every man dies alone. Happiness is internal and understanding yourself is the hardest thing of all!
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