Intimacy
A Novel
-
- $24.99
-
- $24.99
Publisher Description
Intimacy is the story of an unnamed narrator ruminating on suicide. He reflects on the origins and significance of his material possessions, and on the seemingly inconsequential moments in his life, while he prepares to carry out his plans.
In this melancholy novel about a man on the brink of suicide, Stanley Crawford allows readers to question what it really means to be close to a person. Intimacy follows an unnamed narrator planning his own death. His preparations become a trigger and occasion for him to revisit key moments in his life and his material possessions, which are the solid artifacts from his life’s journey.
As sparrows in flight might form a single arrow, the life of the narrator comes into focus as a collage of fleeting events and images. Readers gain insights into tiny moments that slowly build into a picture of a man who seems to have very little, aside from material possessions, to lose.
The narrative pulls the reader along a trail of digressions—about running shoes, about the symbolism of rings—that lead down a proverbial rabbit hole until we realize the narrator’s intentions. Despite our lack of concrete knowledge about the narrator’s life, he allows us to share his thought processes: how every thought leads to the next, how memories seep upward when he picks up a particular T-shirt, or when he glimpses his car keys. And alongside our growing understanding of the narrator comes a recognition of our own thought processes: how we, like him, relate to our bodies; how we, too, cannot break away from the constant motion of our thoughts.
Intimacy is a brief, intense novel charged with the heightened sense of closeness that comes from watching a man’s last hours. It illuminates how brief snapshots of memory can trace the outline of an entire life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this somber novel, Crawford (Seed) details one man's nightly habits, reveling in the complexity of seemingly insignificant minutiae and how they shape human lives. Friday evening, on a "night like thousands before," a meticulous man plans his own death. The wind roars outside his seaside home while he strips off his clothes after a day at work and quietly reflects on his life and physique. The unnamed narrator attempts to mentally trace and cast off the everyday patterns that restrict his movements. He allows his imagination to run free as he sheds items that limit him and conceal his body: shoes, jacket, watch, socks, belt, keys, and wallet. Each accessory prompts him to reconstruct lost moments in a search to uncover what keeps him bound to his current existence. Never looking "too far ahead or, for that matter, too far back," the speaker's exploratory voice pairs well with the use of past tense in a narrative that builds narrative momentum throughout. The novel is consistently unfolding and yet it is very contained; this establishes a persistent sense of tension and suspense that keeps readers engrossed. The narrator's desire to escape a banal life and his frustration with his own fear are very relatable, and lead the story to interesting revelations.
