A great portrait of male restlessness. They really are a different species.

What you read as a young man usually sticks.

You've got to imagine, (if you're not a man; or if you are and haven't thought much about it) that most of the stories men have read up until university have been children's books and as a result have presented an unreal world. A place too silly to be cool. Dull places with very little in the way of high stakes. Older generations... You had good books. My generation had Harry Potter. If you're not a girl, you had little interest in a boy wizard. Or if you did, it was soon thumped out of you by your peers.

In school you're taught about famous people's lives but rarely have access to their thoughts. You gave up reading before highschool (if you ever loved it) and decided computer games and movies were more fun. When you finally get around to reading again, it's most likely to impress women (you try to like poetry first). After a while you gain a personal taste and stumble on Hemingway and life changes. You suddenly become human.

It's the raw and honest stuff you're drawn to first. That inflames the itch. Henry Miller. Jack Kerouac etc... Not because they're great novelists, but because you saw a list of books men should read before they're thirty. So you started there. Soon you learn that the kind of honesty you respond to isn't factual honesty... It's more of a creative reorganisation of the truth. A contemporary example would be Karl Ove Knausgård. A writer who is solely focused on unpicking the spirit. Expressing thoughts both wise and fierce. But not preoccupied with accurately recording facts.

By 35 you decide to reread Miller and find him a chore. Like an old chum you trip over in a pub and skillfully dodge taking any contact details for. You've grown.

But some authors continue to fire up that very male spirit within you and Kureishi is one such writer. And no woman you've ever given the book to has liked it. But every guy has. And that tells you all you need to know.

If you've read all at, it's safe to say you're onboard for the actual review because if you've given up you're on of the people that complain that the title is 'Intimacy' and the novel never shows any genuine intimacy. I mean ... Slow clap... That's the point.

Intimacy is a novel about a man who cannot allow himself to be vulnerable. A very real situation for men. There are people in his life, other men, but they are just as clueless and can offer no advice. What seems like advice is actually just a series of questions about how much he has considered his decision to leave his wife and children. He has.

The whole situation could be resolved if he was able to communicate with his wife about how he felt. It's clear we only hear his side of things and it's an unreliable narrator at that. But there are breakthrough moments of her attempts to reach into his solitary world.

The thoughts he has are meant to be a warning to the reader. He isn't a nice person. It is his punishment, the isolation, for a life of frivolity and idleness indulged in. A sort of a comeuppance for merely surviving by the lucky virtue of generational privilege.

If you're a man, you'll recognise your worst traits. If you're a woman you'll think all men are scumbags. But that's the point. If you're a smarter reader you'll see that it's raw honesty is what can draw you into a very intimate understanding of the character and it will allow you to see the insecurities and challenges that malign the character's development. A little empathy puts you into his shoes.

If you came away from this bent out of shape... The author managed to do exactly what he intended, because you felt strongly about it, and it was you who failed to do the bare minimum required... learn something from it.