THE INTIMACY
By
His wife thinks it's a crummy idea meant to reject her. His brother sees it as an arrogant one-upping maneuver. His mother believes he has tipped over the edge. But this novel's unnamed protagonist, a Vietnam veteran and now a philosophy professor, is determined: he rents a room in a boarding house, shuts his eyes with cotton, adhesive tape, and a blindfold, and prepares to rediscover the world via touch. ""Combing sensations of touch to create a new dimensions of life, or a new sense of reality, or beauty that might well transport or change or release one from all the ugliness one already felt to be real."" Add the landlord's young daughter and our hero is set for a colossal touchy-feely session: ""So very delicious. Tender, soft, holding. As though children forming within the magic of those rings. His shoulders never seeming so broad, strong. For all that was so light. Little bodies so close."" Prose like this could successfully act as a one-unit guerrilla action against the sexual revolution; even root-canal work suddenly seems preferable. Want to know what this book is like? Cottonball those eyelids, tape them closed, blindfold yourself to be triply sure--and run your fingerpads over this review a hundred times. . . . Finished? Well, if you found that a meaningful, liberating experience, stumble posthaste in the direction of The Intimacy.