Overview
Jay, the narrator of Hanif Kureishi's third novel, tells his story on the night that he is preparing to leave his lover, Susan, and their two boys. He and Susan live comfortably in London. Each loves the children. Yet Jay, "lost in the middle of [his] life," craves and depends on passion in life, and it is no longer there. Kureishi strips away all posturing and self-justification to expose the flaws of his own protagonist and the failure of intimacy. Searingly honest, he explores the fears and desires that drive a man to leave a woman.Editorials
Vogue
Intense...Intimacy is about men in crisis and it reminds us of a few painful facts. Baby boomers are as vulnerable to midlife breakdowns as their parents were...the sexual revolution hasn't come close to solving that age-old problem of men with a roving eye.Vanity Fair
The forces of fear and desire that propel men to abandon the mothers of their children (and then write about it) form the dark heart of Hanif Kureishi's provocative novel Intimacy.Laura Miller
Hanif Kureishi once wrote well-populated books and screenplays that thrummed with the vitality of life in contemporary London -- multiracial, polysexual and politically raucous, with characters chasing after everything from money and sex to spiritual enlightenment, ironclad fundamentalism and even true love. His screenplays -- My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid -- and novels -- The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album -- were fetching and lively, the work of a writer endlessly engaged in and amused by his world and undaunted by its myriad contradictions.
Now Kureishi mostly writes about himself. His recent collection of short stories, Love in a Blue Time, and the slim, patently autobiographical novel Intimacy brood over midlife crises of a depressingly generic nature. In Intimacy, Jay -- a writer who, like Kureishi, was once nominated for an Academy Award -- prepares to leave Susan, the mother of his two small sons, whom he's lived with for six years. Their relationship has degenerated into a loveless routine, the two partners playing roles straight out of a pop psychologist's case study. He's a romantic, boyish fuck-up; she's a scold. He relies on her "humdrum dexterity and ability to cope" while secretly resenting her for making him feel weak. She criticizes him constantly, then blames him for being emotionally remote. Without a doubt, their union is toxic and doomed. The night before he plans to move in with a divorced pal, Jay wanders the house, marinating in self-pity and guilt, occasionally mustering flashes of the opportunistic defiance of his much-mourned youth. ("Desire is naughty and doesn't conform to our ideals ... Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent.")
Meandering and formless, Intimacy has the honest immediacy of an extended journal entry. It is surely an accurate portrait of the interior of a perpetual child, a man who has convinced himself that his fear of life's depths is actually a passion for its summits. But this sort of thing -- like a note left by a suicide -- can be crushing to read unless the author suggests some dawning of insight or perspective, and it's not even clear what, exactly, Kureishi believes about Jay's dilemma. He has Jay describe the youth culture he grew up in and still misses as "the apotheosis of the defiantly shallow"; he has a friend of Jay's observe, "You remind me of someone who only ever reads the first chapter of a book. You never discover what happens next." But none of these insights seem to stick.
As his hero heads out the door filled with puppyish hopes about Nina, the fuzzily idealized club girl he hopes will restore him, Kureishi ends on a note of uplift. The problem is, it seems painfully obvious that once Nina comes into clearer focus she'll be deemed just as unsatisfactory as Susan. So much frantic self-contemplation and so little self-knowledge make for a dispiriting tale -- doubly so when it comes from the same pen that wrote the saucily picaresque novel The Buddha of Suburbia. Kureishi's admirers will just have to repeat the hopeful mantra that parents of teenagers and families of befuddled middle-aged men everywhere intone: It's only a phase.
— Salon
Harpers Bazaar
Kureishi is, simply, a wonderful writer, and this is a work of dark beauty...Kureishi displays elegance, wit and economy...This is Kureishi's gift...[he] can render men in all their patheticness, self-justification and desire.Jim Shepard
Kureishi provides in Intimacy a one-night crucible for the education of a heart. The novel is wonderful on the particular and reluctant intimacy of hurting, as well as on the other sort of intimacy: that excess of belief that allows a glimpse of the state of grace called love.— Bookforum
Walter Kirn
Proceeding by means of portentous interjections between longer descriptive passages, Intimacy aspires to a terrifying, fatalistic flatness, but what it achieves is just handsome tedium.— New York Magazine
Elizabeth Gleick
Kureishi succeeds in creating a vivid portrait of one particular man's experience with one particular woman—a portrait that bears a striking resemblance to the author's own life. The reader does not have to like Jay for this to be powerful, if not exactly joyous reading.— Time Magazine
Jane Mendelsohn
...Kureishi seems to be earnestly posing the same questions that Jay askssuch as: "We must treat other people as if they were real. But are they?....In the endlike Jay taunting SusanIntimacy almost seems to want to provoke the reader with its unlikable tone. But as with Jaythere's something about the novel that resists criticism....A devastating portrait. —The New York Times Book ReviewA. Magazine
...[A] devastating and resonating portrait of absent emotions...Time Out New York
Engaging...an exploration of morality, responsibility and love.Jane Mendelsohn
...Kureishi seems to be earnestly posing the same questions that Jay asks, such as: "We must treat other people as if they were real. But are they?....In the end, like Jay taunting Susan, Intimacy almost seems to want to provoke the reader with its unlikable tone. But as with Jay, there's something about the novel that resists criticism....A devastating portrait.— The New York Times Book Review