There is something decidedly unintimate about calling a novel “Intimacies.” The refusal to specify (what, whose) feels like a hedge. And yet “Intimacies,” by the author Katie Kitamura, achieves a kind of truth in advertising. Kitamura pursues various definitions of the word: knowledge of, closeness with, closeness to. At times, intimacy suggests friendship—a nearness of hearts—and other times merely precision, a nearness in sense, or proximity, a nearness in space. These forms of closeness want to bleed together, and characters sweat to keep them straight, to be close to one another in the “right” ways. The result is a rich, novelistic portrait of an abstraction.
The book, Kitamura’s fourth, follows an unnamed woman who has left New York—having lost her father, to a long illness—and come to The Hague, for work. She speaks in an unadorned first person, and reveals an acute but incomplete grasp of her surroundings. “I was surprised by how easily and frequently I lost my bearings,” she says, sounding like Sebald, another perceptive emigrant. (Her intelligence and sense of dissociation have the same uncanny quality of reinforcing each other.) The woman’s affect is also the novel’s: haunted, unstable, and intermittently hopeful. (“I had begun looking for something, although I didn’t know exactly what.”) Partway through the book, the narrator’s new boyfriend, Adriaan, decamps to Lisbon to finalize his divorce; she moves into his enviable apartment, and weeks pass with no word from him. Meanwhile, she begins to spend time with an art historian whose twin brother was mugged and brutally beaten. The assault occurred recently, in another friend’s neighborhood, and all three—the siblings and the friend—seem thrown, viscerally transformed. The narrator studies them with empathy and a quiet interest, as if their behavior contained an answer to the puzzle of violence, how it changes the course of things, how its consequences linger.
The narrator, it emerges, has a professional as well as a personal stake in these questions. She works as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court, where her “daily activity,” she says, hinges on the “description, elaboration, delineation” of horrors. Shortly after Adriaan leaves, she is assigned to the trial of a former President, also unnamed, who stands accused of war crimes. (He is partially modelled on Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia; that the I.C.C. seems to prosecute with particular zeal evildoers from nonwhite countries is not lost on Kitamura.) The narrator, although supremely competent, does not always relish her job. It makes her feel permeable, open like a ramshackle house to the drafts of others’ moods and desires, and aspiring to perfect technical fidelity robs her of understanding.“You can be so caught up in the minutiae” of interpretation, she explains, “that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying.”
In Kitamura’s books, career is frequently a metonym for character. “A Separation,” her previous novel, featured a narrator who was also a translator (albeit of literature) and who exhibits a translator’s apparent passivity. At one point, she reproduces a soliloquy from her husband on professional mourners, who are paid to weep and wail at funerals in Greece. “You, the bereaved, are completely liberated from the need to emote,” the husband had said. “You purchase an instrument to express your sorrow, or perhaps it’s less like an instrument and more like a tape recorder and tape, you simply press play.” The narrator in “A Separation” seems enthralled by this system of surrogate feeling, and, in “Intimacies,” we find her counterpart trapped in its gears. At work, something nauseating has happened: the former President has taken a shine to her. She suspects his favor might relate to her soothing blankness, the way her subjectivity yields to others’. “I was pure instrument,” she thinks, “someone without will or judgment, a consciousness-free zone into which he could escape, the only company he could now bear.”
If passivity was an occupational hazard for the protagonist of “A Separation,” complicity is a problem for her successor. Her profession is to be a professional—to encase the monstrous in bureaucracy and expertise—and although this has not dulled her emotions it does dictate where and how she feels them. (She remembers being “startled” by the “unmeasured” tones of lawyers arguing about hideous crimes.) Kitamura devotes much more time in her new book to the narrator’s vocation, which is portrayed as subtle and dynamic, demanding exactitude, improvisation, and a flair for pressing artifice into the service of truth. There are many novels about women looking for agency, but agency, “Intimacies” wants to insist, is unavoidable. As the judicial setting highlights, accountability—others’ and one’s own—proves the more elusive quarry.
One point of intersection between the exercise of agency and the evasion of accountability might be charisma. Kitamura’s narrators, perhaps because they are outwardly unassuming, tend to fixate on this quality, greedily parsing the advantages it confers. (Because we see the world through their eyes, the books themselves feel exquisitely attuned to performance; all of human affairs can seem to run on currents of attraction and repulsion.) In “Intimacies,” the former President has an aura of force and elegance, a smooth attentiveness, but he is just one mesmerizing figure in a story lousy with them. It is implied that the trial’s defense attorney and even Adriaan are coasting on their handsomeness. (In fact, many of the book’s male characters could pass for Christopher, the husband in “A Separation,” who “risked spreading his charm thin.”) As the book proceeds, this wary diagnosing of magnetism becomes a sort of narrative tic. The victim of the mugging has features that are “primal” and “memorable,” exuding “some dark charisma.” A young warlord evinces “a dazzling air of command.” And Adriaan’s wife, when she shows up, is—inevitably—“improbably beautiful and also highly polished, as if she lived in continual expectation of being observed.”
There is a whiff of courting the reader to this study of star power. By dwelling on others’ seductiveness, the narrator presents herself as relatively guileless and likably average. But one struggles not to notice that many of the book’s characters seem drawn irresistibly to her. There’s the dictator, for one. There’s Adriaan, who asks for the narrator’s phone number within a few minutes of meeting her, and, several months later, invites her to live in his home. The defense attorney tries to pick her up three times. The sister of the mugging victim converses briefly with her at a gallery event and then, smitten, e-mails a mutual friend, requesting to be put in touch.
I thought here of the psychological phenomenon called “egocentric bias,” which causes people to overestimate the degree to which others’ perceptions resemble their own. One effect of the bias, as the researcher Vanessa Bohns has demonstrated, is that we tend to downplay the pressures we place on those around us. In “Intimacies,” the narrator’s own power and persuasiveness seem veiled to her. This deepens Kitamura’s theme of accountability—we don’t take responsibility for things we don’t realize we’ve done—but, to me, it also creates a crack in the storytelling. “Intimacies,” like “A Separation,” is explicitly about closeness and distance, drawing together and pulling apart. Kitamura depicts these processes as strikingly physical, as if governed by literal magnetism—the tug of a man’s charm, the repellency of his deceit, the way a friend’s misfortune can both beckon and paralyze you. But, in a novel about seeking the correct calibration for various relationships (the narrator senses herself to be too separate from Adriaan, not separate enough from the dictator), placing so much weight on invisible influences elides the role of decisions, discretion, and judgment, reducing a complex dance of personalities to a game of positive and negative charges. It can feel as though Kitamura’s fascination with beauty exists in tension with the book’s richest theme: how we decide how close we get.
“Intimacies” is not a shallow novel, but it is, finally, a deep and layered novel about superficiality. One of my favorite moments takes place in the courtroom, after proceedings have ended for the day, when the narrator catches a glimpse of the dictator. “His shoulders slumped and he suddenly appeared much older,” she says. “I realized it must have taken him great effort to appear before the Court with his posture so erect, his bearing still presidential, to marshal what charisma remained, because contrary to popular belief, charisma was not inherent but had to be constantly reinforced.” For an instant, magnetism is doxxed, revealed as theatre, and the relief is that of leaving a brilliantly overlit room. But the implications of the moment run deeper: in exposing the pneumatics of charm, Kitamura insists that there are motivations behind it. People have reasons for pushing one another around, and for endlessly repositioning themselves; they have longings and aversions—entire histories—that elude even the sharpest eye. It would be a privilege to watch Kitamura, with the full scope of her intelligence and art, illuminate these intimacies, too.
