Intimacies is intense, unsettling
Intimacies Katie Kitamura Riverhead
At the opening of Katie Kitamura's intense, unsettling new novel, Intimacies, an unnamed narrator has left New York in a fugue of grief and signed a oneyear contract in The Hague. Intimacies is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange. Soon after arriving in The Hague, the narrator begins dating a handsome man named Adriaan. Little has been articulated, but much assumed between them. “There was already a certain amount of routine to the way we were together,” she says. “Some deep familiarity superseding our many differences.”
One of those differences is that he has a wife and family.
She knows she's in a precarious position. That wariness, though, is not enough to keep her from falling in love or moving into Adriaan's apartment when he goes to Lisbon to see his estranged wife. Adriaan says he plans to ask for a divorce. But then his calls become more infrequent, and his trip to Lisbon is inexplicably extended another week. And another.
For a smart woman hyperalert to the nature of language, Adriaan's oblique, infrequent text messages create a crazy-making predicament. But the narrator's attention to the subtlest inflections of communication is not merely a personality trait; it's the central qualification for her job: She's an interpreter working at the World Court.
The incongruity between her domestic life and professional life is what makes Intimacies so fascinating. While the narrator is trying to figure out what's going on with her boyfriend, she's spending all day working on a trial that's generating headlines around the world. The former president of a war-torn African country has been apprehended and brought to The Hague to answer charges that he committed crimes against humanity. The former president's defence team has requested her personally. His chief lawyer offers a chilling compliment: “He likes you.”
The former president, like the narrator, is never named, an omission that emphasizes their fraught and peculiar relationship. Although the narrator is horrified by reports of the former president's atrocities, her work requires her to draw so close to this elegant monster that she can inhabit his mind.
Through parts of this story, Kitamura is exploring impossibly remote territory; few of us will ever have any contact, let alone close contact, with someone who committed crimes against humanity. But with her Jamesian attention to the slightest movement of bodies and words, Kitamura keeps Intimacies rooted to the ordinary domestic experiences of her narrator, her petty jealousies, her passing suspicions.
Who could endure that rawnerve sensitivity to the power of language to love, to deceive, to promise, to kill? Kitamura pulls us through a rising panic of hyper-awareness until the story's fever finally breaks with a note of hope and relief. But that can't quell the novel's reverberations, which expose something incomprehensible about the moral dimensions of modern life.