Beginning with its awful cover, dominated by publicity shots of the two authors, and the labored oxymoron of its title, Distant Intimacy is a book that almost seems to court mockery and loathing. Within it one finds gathered the year-long e-mail correspondence of the septuagenarian men of letters Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein, who, though they’ve never met, have long admired each other, and who decided to conduct the exchange as a kind of protracted lark. Smug, petty, backbiting, rife with mutual flattery and showily polyglot prose, the book gives you every reason to declare it insufferable, and in the U.K., where it was published a few months ago, critics have swiftly and gleefully done just that. (See in particular John Crace’s pastiche in The Guardian.) One might also object that there’s something inherently vain and contrived about the whole enterprise. What makes these bitter old coots think that anyone will relish their spite-mongering?
I do, for one. Whatever its faults, Distant Intimacy is often wickedly entertaining, presenting as it does the rare spectacle of two clever and learned veterans of the literary wars letting it all hang out. The book stands, moreover, as a compelling accidental study in stylistic contrast. Like the conversational essays on which his reputation rests, Epstein’s letters are models of relaxed, lucid, feline exposition. By contrast, those of Raphael—an American-born English writer whose diverse career has encompassed over twenty novels, a bunch of screenplays (including Eyes Wide Shut and the Oscar-winning