Intimacy (review)

Kureishi, Hanif. Intimacy. Scribner, 1999.

Explosive—and justifiable—controversy surrounds the 1998 British best-seller Intimacy by Anglo/Indian Hanif Kureishi. Light to hand at barely a hundred pages, the novel weighs heavy with macho attitude. Too, while it is Kureishi’s most autobiographically confessional work to date, it tiptoes most lightly of his works around issues of racial and sexual identity formation. Intimacy records a sour night in the life of Jay—a fortysomething man who, not so unlike the author, leaves his partner, foodianado and publisher Susan, and their two ABC-age sons. Unlike Kureishi’s earlier racially identified, bisexual, and socially transgressive characters, Jay is a middle-class, heterosexual misogynist whose greatest transgression is that he simply wants out: He craves the world—a world that, as he puts it, is a “skirt I want to lift up” (15).

Jay is uncannily like Kureishi himself. He’s a successful writer and scenarist who makes a healthy income adapting books, penning reviews, and producing plays . And also like his author, Jay is a mixed Anglo and Indian Brit who hails from suburban working-class roots: Jay’s father’s a clerk and his mother’s a factory worker. (Kureishi’s sister recently refuted certain of Intimacy’s familial facts, accusing Kureishi of fictionalizing their family into a stereotype of alterity easily digested by the masses.) When Jay leaves Susan, he hints that he might hook back up with his erstwhile twentysomething love-interest, Nina. Kureishi left his partner, Tracy Scoffield, and their twin boys for a twenty-three year-old who, like Nina, plays drums for a rock group. Oddly, however, whereas Kureishi has made a career out of creating mostly bisexual and biracial characters and has capitalized on his own bisexual charm and “dark” good looks—appearing sexily on jacket covers and posing for Paul Smith at fashion shows and magazines—Jay is oblivious to his racial identity. In the end, the voice of Intimacy sounds like a whining combination of beat-your-male-drum-in-the-woods Robert Bly and I’m-a-poor-uptown-white-boy Martin Amis.

During the 1980s Kureishi first made his mark as a young Indo-Brit writer, scenarist, and playwright with an “Empire-Writes-Back” attitude. Along with a flourishing of mostly male postcolonial writers—Caryl Phillips, Ben Okri, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Salman Rushdie, to name a few—Kureishi fleshed out a panoply of black London types (conservative and radical, straight and queer, Indians and Africans, West Indians, Bangladeshis) that challenged mainstream ideas of blackness in a largely racist and homophobic Britain. The Buddha of Suburbia’s Karim Amir goes through puberty during an Enoch Powell era of racist oppression (Powell likened the ethnic subject to a contaminating “river of blood”). In My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and The Black Album, main characters struggle with their racial and bisexual identities during Thatcher’s conservative muscle flexing. Like his characters, Kureishi came of age as a writer during a time when, for example, Thatcher passed Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1987)—an act that criminalized queers and lesbians, referring to them, in a metaphor akin to Powell’s, as diseased “foreign invaders.” We might ask why Kureishi’s voice and attitude have suddenly shifted to almost completely deny the intersection of race and sexuality in the formation of the subaltern subject. Have the times changed that much?

Certainly, the racial and sexual climate of the late 1990s differs from that of the 1980s. Much representational turf has been won through black-authored resistance narratives in films, novels, and elsewhere. Perhaps, then, we can finally say that black writers like Kureishi complicate the earlier race-focused narratives by, as in the case of Intimacy, almost completely sidestepping the racial and sexuality issues. However, while many more British othered authors and directors now have access to those representational arenas that powerfully shape the mainstream imagination (just take a look at the number of black, gay, lesbian, and subaltern women writers who’ve been picking up the Booker in the last fifteen years), the everyday street reality remains aflame...