Intimacy

I so enjoyed TheBuddha of Suburbia that I was super looking forward to reading more of Hanif Kureishi’s work, even more so when I found out that he also wrote My Beautiful Laundrette.  My Beautiful Laundrette is a wonderful film.  I can’t recommend it enough; if you haven’t already seen it, go and watch it now.  Even if mid-1980s mixed-race gay relationships aren’t your thing, it’s worth a watch for Daniel Day-Lewis’s hair alone.  Anyway, back to the point: I had high expectations for Intimacy.  It doesn’t really disappoint, but after such a long run of great books, it seems a little mediocre. 

The plot is simply the thoughts of a man, Jay, on the night before he leaves partner Susan and their two children.  Jay’s kind of a jerk.  After refusing to marry Susan he repeatedly proposes to his much younger mistress.  I’m not a big believer in marriage, but even I can see that this is a pretty shitty move on Jay’s part.  Everything plot-wise is revealed in flashbacks, so we get a sense of the relationship falling apart while we already know that, ultimately, Jay has no real interest in saving it.  I spent a lot of this book feeling bad for Susan.  She could do better.  It’s not by any means a bad book- no I didn’t like the main character and the ending- to spoiler it- is completely unbelievable.  His oft proposed to ex-mistress is waiting with open arms once Jay leaves his family.  It doesn’t seem likely and he’s not likeable enough that the unlikely can be overlooked.

I do like the narrative structure of the book.  It’s incredibly difficult to make 150-odd pages of essential plotlessness interesting, but Kureishi nails it.  The fact that you know the relationship is doomed from the start gives the whole thing this wickedly bittersweet air.  It does, however, make the book very difficult to write about.  Most things that aren’t Jay leaving Susan feel like subplot- his happily married friends and his miserably divorced ones.  The tone of Intimacy is much more grown up than The Buddha of Suburbia, I remember comparing that book to Adrian Mole at the time.  The adult tone isn’t too surprising, given that Kureishi is writing about adults this time, and cynical ones at that.  The book is a short one, and in all reality not much happens.  This does not make for edge of the seat blogging.

I found, generally, this to be an easy book to read quickly but I’m really struggling to write about it in much depth.  As I said, compared to the stuff I’ve been reading recently, it’s fairly mediocre and I’m not really sure why it’s on the list.  It’s a book that’s hard to see as an enduring classic or anybody’s favourite.  Maybe it comes down to lack of experience in the world.  I’ve never had a family to abandon and I don’t really care much for kids- especially Jay’s fictional and nameless ones, so some of the emotional punch of the family’s inevitable upheaval is lost on me.  In the end I’m just left with the feeling that Susan is better off without Jay and I really don’t think that’s what Kureishi was going for.

My next book is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.