book review WHAT'S NEW LIBRARY FEATURES REVIEWS ... book reviews : Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi Intimacy
Hanif Kureishi Intimacy
Hanif Kureishi
London 1998
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'I think I have become the adults in The Catcher in the Rye '; this is a defining moment in Hanif Kureishi's brilliant new novel, Intimacy . A painfully analytic breakdown of a breakdown, Intimacy makes a savagely contemporary statement. The Catcher in the Rye generation, that group of readers for whom adolescence first became a cult are now growing old, and as Salinger created a monument to romantic, dispirited youth, Kureishi has given birth to its seemingly inevitable offspring, the monument to the mid-life crisis. Intimacy is a novel that begins with a conclusion. Kureishi's narrator Jay has made a decision, the kind of decision that is usually reserved for the end of a novel, to leave his partner and his children. Jay has decided to walk out on his cosy life of middle-class, Guardian reading domesticity, in order to pursue his dreams. His dreams are nebulous, self-deluding and driven in the most part by a desire for freedom, for blank pages in his diary and for a young girl around whom he has built a rather shaky edifice of erotic and romantic fantasy. It is early evening when the novel begins. He has resolved to leave in the morning. This is a narrative of waiting, a long night of painful self analysis, of resentment, confusion, love and fear. Its brilliance lies in Kureishi's ability to allow the reader total empathy with but almost no sympathy for his protagonist. Jay is by turns childlike, childish, adolescent and bitterly adult. Above all, he is unrelievedly self absorbed. He is a man so well acquainted with himself (though sadly lacking in self-knowledge) that his painstakingly depicted masturbation is like an act of tired, well-worn and loveless marital sex. | |
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