The art of intimacy The space between

Part of Graywolf's "Art of" series on the craft of writing, edited by Charles Baxter, this first work of nonfiction by novelist D'Erasmo (The Sky Below) examines the concept of intimacy and the ways this mysterious phenomenon has been conveyed by writers, visual artists, and filmmakers. D'Erasmo organizes the book into chapters based on the places where intimacy occurs, though these settings are themselves abstract: "Meeting in the Image"; "Meeting in the If"; "Meeting in the Dark." The word intimacy evokes images of love, but the book also delves into the darker side of the subject: obsession. The relationship between a torturer and his victim, D'Erasmo argues, is fundamentally similar to the relationship between a man and woman having deeply emotional sex. The book's highlight is the meta-textual section "Meeting in the White Space," in which even the reader's own intimacy with the author is held up for inspection. This can mean either the author divulging moments of vulnerability, as D'Erasmo does mere pages earlier, or works of fiction in which the reader's interpretation of a character's actions makes him or her complicit in the events that unfold. D'Erasmo provides a lucid and provocative examination of the ill-defined concept of intimacy. Agent: Bill Clegg, William Morris. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The latest in the publisher's The Art Of... series, compact books exploring the writer's craft, this one addresses the variety, power and challenges of intimacy. Highly regarded novelist D'Erasmo (Creative Writing/Columbia Univ.; The Sky Below, 2009, etc.) focuses mainly, though not exclusively, on literary fiction. "Like looking directly at the sun, looking directly at the creation of intimacy in fiction seems like a dangerous business," she writes. It certainly can be risky in the work of D.H. Lawrence, for example, yet D'Erasmo notes that for Lawrence, "intimacy--usually, though not always, sexual intimacy between men and women--is actually not so much a way in as a way out of the prison house of self, of place, of circumstance and into a larger, even a much larger, consciousness." She is every bit as interested in nonsexual intimacy: as expressed in the "tentative, subjunctive, speculative" narratives of William Maxwell or in the "complicity" between writer and reader in novels by Italo Calvino and Percival Everett. Those are among the better-known names mentioned here (along with Virginia Woolf and Joan Didion); most readers will not be familiar with a good deal of the fiction D'Erasmo so intimately dissects. Broad-based appeal is not her primary goal; indeed, she is dismissive of "the ubiquitousness, the cheapness even, of intimacy as a modern ideal....A particularly modern, faux-sincere, kitsch intimacy sells everything from afternoon talk shows to pictures on Instagram to Facebook's endlessly mined personal information, so glittering to retailers." This instant intimacy scants the complexities investigated in serious fiction, where "[i]ntimacy...can be rendered as a space between that is as close as a breath or as great as a century." Suggestive rather than definitive, which is only to be expected with such an expansive topic.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.