On Katie Kitamura's "Intimacies"

In explaining "Why Netflix looks like that," essayist Will Tavlin for N+1 Magazine recently wrote that, not only do studios know that audiences split their attention between smartphones and televisions, they cater to it:

"Slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for [Netflix] told me a common note from company executives is 'have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.'"

These are the dark forces working against ScreenSaver, and for the first 90 or so pages, I included "Intimacies" among their legion—a novel I could only describe as "The first book you can read while watching Netflix."

Little happens in "Intimacies," and because of its obsessively observant narrator, it often happens twice. Glasses of water are brought up to the protagonist's lips and then brought back down. Trips to work involve grabbing keys, opening the front door, closing the front door, and using the grabbed keys to lock up. A gallery painting is found and described—its title card literally written in the novel's text—only to be interpreted twice, once by the narrator, another time by a guest. One metaphorical set piece is analyzed before the characters engage with it. Nothing is allowed to simply rest in "Intimacies," it merely waits to be exhumed.

Thankfully, by its close, "Intimacies" better reveals its experiment: What happens when a hyper-, hyper-vigilant narrator cannot see herself?

The results, like a gradeschool science fair, are predictable and trite: A love story torn from 1,000 Xanga blogs ends in delusion (he's married, gorl), and a false moral equivalency is drawn between our Passenger Protagonist and a man being tried for crimes against humanity at The Hague.

And yet...

"Intimacies" hides another experiment worth exploring, in which the narrator is largely cast without race. She is cleverly obscured, with family history in New York and Singapore (a deliberate choice that forces questions about the country's British and Japanese occupations, along with its more recent US and Chinese influence), never described physically, and she twice takes on monikers more often associated with White Americans ("gentrifier" early in the novel, an owner of "terrible history" near the end (Sorry, folks, I don't make the associations, chattel slavery and American Indian genocide do)).

This attempt at "racelessness" reads entirely external, forced in by the author, but, with some distance, it's an elegant and impressive reversal of the novel's entire construct.

Rather than having the protagonist hide her decisions from herself, Kitamura hides our decisions from the protagonist—we have no opportunity to stereotype, and thus, we present no threat in deciding her story for her.

None of this fundamentally changes "Intimacies," but it's a lovely little morsel amidst a boney plot rationed across too many pages.