Of Marriages and Mediocrity: Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi (Book Review)


The first and most alarming thing you find out about marriage, pretty much within days of your own wedding, is that it is fraught with uncertainty. At first I thought this was just me, but then I began talking to other people and I realized that pretty much everyone experiences crippling doubt at one point or another about whether getting married was the right decision. 

There was too much of me, I know that. We want love but we don’t want to lose ourselves.

Marriage is tough, that I knew. But that you could question yourself so viciously, or feel your emotions fluctuate so wildly out-of-control was an experience I hadn’t been adequately prepared for. You can try to explain what being so intricately bound to another person feels like, but words aren’t enough for living through the experience, and sometimes I felt adrift, faithless and unable to figure out what could make things right. Of course things always got back on track. And then we would crash and right ourselves again, over and over again until I finally got the hang of it. But it’s a process, and like all things which change you, it always lurked on the edge of complete and total destruction. 

That’s why this book is so hard to take. Not because it’s complex and hard hitting, but because it focuses solely on the really, really ugly portions of a relationship. Of course, any relationship where you spend extended time with each other will eventually reveal its underbelly, full of horribleness and spite, but with love you cover it up and bandage it and learn to move on. This book, unfortunately, focuses only on the crueler aspects of marriage, on the night on which our protagonist, a middle aged man named Jay, decides to leave his wife and two sons behind. 

“The house is full of poison. Susan wants me to be kind. I can’t be kind. We can do nothing for one another. It is a fact. I have decided to leave.”

I think the truth is that reading this book made me miserable, and made my husband exasperated. “Why are you reading it if it’s getting you down?” he kept asking, but I was determined to struggle through, because leaving books half read feels like some sort of personal failure I know I should learn to get over. In the end, what helped was the fact that the book itself was so abominable. Absolutely no plot, completely pointless characters, and I didn’t care much for the conversations either. And of course, a ridiculously whiny, ultimately unlikable protagonist. 

This, then, could be our last evening as an innocent, complete, ideal family; my last night with a woman I have known for ten years, a woman I know almost everything about, and want no more of.

I know that what ultimately led to this book’s downfall for me was the fact that our narrator was, frankly, not a very good person. And not a bad person in any interesting terms (like the female lead in Gone Girl or in Gone with the Wind or any other famous, compelling novel I can name with unlikeable main characters), but rather just bland, petty and mean and not really worth pages and pages of rumination. 

It is unhappiness and the wound that compels me. Then I can understand and be of use. An atmosphere of generalized depression and mid-temperature gloom makes me feel at home.

Since the book tracks the events of a single night, interspersed with Jay’s thoughts about his past and fears for the present, we are forced to spend way too much time in close proximity with him. This is unfortunate because not only is Jay a pointless person, he also has a weird, unhealthy relationship with sex. I had the exact same problem with Kureishi’s hero in Something to tell you, which also incidentally featured a middle aged man hitting a midlife crisis. In this book, Jay’s constant and lecherous examination of the topic, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the days spent lunching at spots where our hero knows ‘fashionable young women in close-fitting items’ will be present all serve to create an uncomfortable desire to distance yourself from this character.

From the beginning, starting with the girls at school, and the teachers in particular, I have looked at women in shops, on the street, in the bus, at parties, and wondered what it would be like to be with them, and what pleasure we might kindle.

There were some points in the novel, admittedly, where I almost thought it would redeem itself and shine some much-needed light on the complexities of marriage, but Kureishi ruins the perfect set-up by never managing to really colour the relationship as that between two people. Instead, what you do have is a very one-sided, close-minded portrait of the marriage from the point of view of a bitter, bored old man. For some, such a fictional world might make for interesting reading, but if an author chooses to write solely from the perspective of a horrible character without managing to make me care about them, then for me the narrative is a complete failure. 

I have been trying to convince myself that leaving someone isn’t the worst thing you can do to them. Sombre it may be, but it doesn’t have to be a tragedy. If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new.

The story does the same thing with its smart writing, falling over from the just-perfect to the overly decorative. At the beginning, Kureishi’s words feel incisive and controlled, an experienced author holding forth on life’s uncertainties and the pitfalls of growing older. Pretty soon though, it becomes less Pulitzer-prize-worthy, and more Hallmark quotes. I compared the first book I read by Kureishi to the atrocity that was Home Boy by Naqvi, my standard for all crappy Pakistani writing that’s well known. This book maintains the status quo, by staying exactly as bad as the first book. 

It is easy to kill oneself off without dying. Unfortunately, to get to the future one has to live through the present.

Unfortunately, just like Home Boy, I continued to not care for our main character pretty much from the beginning to the end. Even spending pages and pages of reflection with him didn’t endear me to his frustrations. Maybe if, instead of talking about his love affair or his drug taking or his boredom, he had focused a bit more on his past with Susan, tried to figure out where they had fallen apart, there might have been something worth salvaging. As it is, he spends barely one sentence trying to figure out whether he might actually be to blame for their miserable existence, and then promptly forgets all about his momentary self-flagellation completely. 

Have I tried hard enough? Why should I imagine that I am easy to get along with? Perhaps, all this time, she has been making a heroic effort to get along with a morose, over-sensitive, self-absorbed fool.

In any divorce, it is obvious that both the parties involved must have their own grievances, and their own versions of events. Each wife and husband about to be separated must believe that they are in the right, and that the other person is not only horrible enough to be blamed for the ensuing heartbreak, but also horrible enough to consider leaving. Still, the kind of complexity I expected from a story that focuses so solely on a marriage falling apart never manages to describe Susan, the left-behind wife, as a complete person. Instead, what we are left with are Jay’s bitter thoughts and creepy behaviour and adultery and misogyny and pretty much all around unpleasantness. 

It is the men who must go. They are blamed for it, as I will be.

As a rule, a man who complains about being blamed for ending a relationship, when he is in fact the one walking away, is a man not worth spending any time or brain cells upon. And the final nail in the coffin came upon the realization that the author, father of two boys and divorced from a wife with the exact same job as the fictional wife’s, might have written this book more to air dirty laundry and less as a sort of satisfying escapism from others. He could have made his protagonist father to a little girl, if he so desperately wanted to treat divorce as a separation from his children. He could have made an ambitious wife with literally any other job, but sticking so closely to his own life story feels disrespectful at best and a gross invasion of his family’s privacy at the worst. 

All in all, it was not a pleasant reading experience, and I have no wish to ever repeat it again. One extra star for the accidental smart observation, but mostly I’d say Hanif Kureishi hasn’t managed to write anything yet that I’d consider worth reading. Not recommended.