In my darker moods, I worry that literary fiction is emptying out. When I look around at the curt, cool, minimalistic novels that win acclaim from other critics, I think: “But where are the jokes? The comings and goings of everyday life? The boring afternoons? Where are the sausages? Where’s all the stuff?”
Think of it in terms of museums. The first novels were like antiquaries’ storerooms, eccentrically organised and crammed with treasures. Nineteenth-century books were grand palaces with portraits hung shoulder to shoulder, the long gallery opening on to a grand history scene above the stairs. Then there’s the self-contained grand designs of the 20th century, ambitious one-offs that feel like chapels by Rothko or Matisse.
And in our time we have the white cube: blank walls, blank ceiling, sans-serif labels. Quiet, stripped-back stories with intellectual characters who clinically dissect their emotions and communicate without speech marks. No ornamentation or clutter here. Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies is one such novel and even the margins seem to be encroaching on the text as more and more of the world gives way to empty space.
Our narrator — nameless, of course — is a woman who has come to The Hague to work as an interpreter at “The Court”. With only a few words of Dutch, she is isolated from the world around her, drifting in and out of understanding. “On occasion, I found myself stumbling into situations more intimate than I would have liked,” Kitamura writes, unafraid of labouring the point. She has taken up with Adriaan, whose wife has recently left him. Unfortunately, about his personality I can tell you nothing. He is a man; our narrator wants to be with him. Maybe that’s enough.
It’s a sparsely furnished book of chance encounters, where the threat of terrible force hums like an air conditioner in the background. At a function the narrator gets hit on by a gauche man with gelled hair. In a novel where we can barely shake hands without quietly contemplating the dynamics of structural power, a man with gelled hair might as well have ridden into town wearing a black hat and two bandoleers.
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He turns out to be the defence lawyer for a warlord standing trial, who represents, at one remove, the brutality men are capable of. A chance mugging outside a friend’s house reinforces the point. “One day you are living ordinary life with its ordinary ups and downs, and then that life is ripped up and you can never feel entirely secure again.”
The dark-suited war criminals provide the book’s most compelling passages, exuding a terrible charisma. As the narrator finds herself brushing up against chance instances of loss and violence, her job brings her into ever closer proximity with them. At one point, her colleague gets stared down by one in court. “She felt at once, even through the glass wall dividing them, the totality of the man’s will.”
The problem is the whole novel, told in limpid, deliberately monosyllabic prose, seems to be seen through a glass wall, the narrator floating on at Covid-secure distance from everything. She is powerless to emotionally reach Adriaan and as an interpreter she lacks agency: for the man standing trial she is “pure instrument, someone without will or judgment, a consciousness-free zone into which he could escape”.
Well, yes. The evacuated personalities on show, to be sure, exemplify the unfathomable separateness of other human beings. If the book is about a woman’s journey into the paradoxes of intimacy, which she craves and fears, then, I guess, it makes sense that her account of the world should contain, or at least start from, a position of rejecting it. But what surprise can the author offer, when she makes no attempt to know the characters in the first place? How can you unearth things if you didn’t put down any earth to begin with? The story and its characters feel like a pretext for the elegant management of theme.
One passage provides a long exegesis of a Dutch Golden Age painting, in which the ostensibly innocent subject matter slowly reveals itself to be a depiction of an assault. It feels as though it was written in response to an editor’s note that asked: “Would you please lay out your themes very directly for several pages here?”
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It’s not that I don’t agree with Kitamura about power, unknowability, the barbarism of men. It’s that, reading her book, I don’t feel it, don’t hear it or see it. The novel puts the reader into the position of its narrator, looking in through Perspex at a muffled world.
Barack Obama named Intimacies on his summer reading list this year. Perhaps he sees something I don’t. I’m standing here in the white cube, squinting hard, trying to get it. Maybe this is enough. Maybe.
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, Jonathan Cape, 240pp; £14.99
