The Intimates
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A powerful and compassionate debut novel about friendship and how it helps shape us into the people we are
The Intimates is a brilliant and deeply moving first novel about the varieties of romance. Spanning years and continents, beginnings and endings, it is about two gifted and striving people who discover themselves in the reflection they see in each other, and how their affinity anchors them at critical points in their lives.
Maize and Robbie are drawn to each other from the first time they meet in high school. When it becomes obvious that their relationship won't be sexual, they establish a different kind of intimacy: becoming each other's "human diaries." Their passionate Friendship plays out against a backdrop of charged connections: with lovers and would be lovers, family members, teachers, and bosses. For the better part of a decade they're inseparable fellow travelers, but ultimately they must confront the underside of the extreme and complicated closeness that has sustained them since they were teenagers.
Full of indelible characters, engrossing situations, and observations as sharply witty as they are lovely and profound, The Intimates renders the wonders and disappointments of becoming an adult, the thrills and mesmerizing illusions of sex, and the secrets we keep from others and ourselves as we struggle to locate our true character. The Intimates marks the emergence of a remarkable new voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two friends stumble into adulthood in Sassone's charming if shaggy debut, a triptych of episodes covering Maize and Robbie's evolving relationship. The pair date briefly in high school as Robbie tries to hide his crushes on boys, and Maize develops an intense rapport with her guidance counselor and loses her virginity to her college admissions interviewer. In the intervening years, Maize and Robbie fall in and out of touch as he heads to Italy and she takes a job as an assistant to a tyrannical real estate agent. Finally, after they become roommates in New York City, Robbie relies on Maize for moral support as he brings a boyfriend home to meet his mother. That Maize and Robbie continue to orbit each other long after their commonalities have vanished is less surprising than the fact that they do so without any apparent abiding affection for one another, and while Sassone skillfully balances their perspectives, their emotional distance from each other casts an implausible shadow over their travails and blunts the scant dramatic tension to be found in their struggles to grow up.