I have gone through my own practice and tried to identify the things I tend to do. The first is recurrences. I’m sort of an auteur critic in the sense that if I find a writer interesting, I try to read all their work. I do the same thing with musicians and painters. And when you do that, what you begin to notice are recurrences. As I say, I began with style studies, where one paid close attention to tics—not themes but peculiarities, eccentricities, recurrent expressions in a writer’s style. And from there one began to deduce a Weltanschauung. Spitzer calls it a kind of hermeneutic circle. Doesn’t matter what you call it, but Spitzer’s idea is that you find some stylistic peculiarity in a writer and then you begin to find other ones, and when you connect them they form a distinctive worldview. I take style as the central thing. Style meaning precisely this recurrence of certain forms and certain idioms—idiolects, if you like.

In fact, another maxim I have offered myself at certain moments is that ideological critique has to end up being a critique of the self. You can’t recognize an ideology unless, in some sense, you see it in yourself. Making critiques from the outside is like reading books you don’t like because you want to denounce them. Sometimes that can be politically important, and I would never knock that. There are political things one has to do, judgments one has to make, quarrels one has to have. But with literature, it’s much better to deal with things that you like, that you associate yourself with. And then, if there are ideological nuances to that association, it becomes a self-judgment. That is to say, you recognize the role of the ideology in yourself, your own racism or something, and then, from that, you evolve a judgment, if you like.

Gemma doesn’t note the wariness in his voice, because her own words are repeating in her head: “since we moved” as opposed to “moved back.” Which would have made it sound like she and Des had been an item in Ireland originally. But they hadn’t been. They don’t actually know how to be in their country of origin together. They stand around their breakfast bar, swirling espressi. They squirm palely, unsexily on their oversoft mattress, both appalled by Ireland’s lack of bidets. They wear waterproofs in the rain, or carry umbrellas, which once prompted a passing car to roll down the window and shout: “Gay!” In an effort to retrieve a social life, they’ve been leaving jaunty voice memos for school-era friends, inviting them to hang out—friends whose weddings they missed and whose children and health conditions they don’t know the names of. In the messages, Gemma hears her own accent separate out from her, like she’s been dubbed.

On Friday, they’d gone to the best restaurant in the county (something they’d planned for as soon as Gemma was able to belly laugh without wincing), but Desmond had shaken the bread basket on their table and commented: “These weren’t cut from the same baguette. This is the ends of other people’s breads.” The dismay in his voice stopped Gemma from finding it funny.

In the rearview mirror, Gemma sees her husband’s face hued gray by his phone. He’s checking where sempre dritto leads on Google Maps, scanning the next few minutes of their lives for junctions. That wanting to know had often inspired and even aroused her. But his wanting to know had lately tipped over into needing, his curiosity oxidizing into something altogether less shiny.

Oh, Desmond Desmond Desmond. What does he need her to do? Tell him it wasn’t his fault? But the police report said as much, in plain English. He’d been driving like a grown man recently struck by his father. That morning, his father had sprung at him but had been too out of sync with himself to land the punch. “It happens,” the nurse said mildly, as if referring to matters of the toilet. It happens? Desmond repeated to Gemma in the corridor. That someone who’s always loved you, pretty well without pause, suddenly and certainly ends their subscription?

It does happen. You look at a person you’ve known and who has known you—a person with whom you’ve shared an understanding beyond language, a person whose smell comes out of your own pores—and you want to protect your memories with them. Which is to say, you have no mind to add new ones.

It’s a devil’s bargain, being a writer. You’re committed to exposing yourself and your family to the outside world, for money. My work had been known, before Intimacy, as being quite charming, fun⁠—people really turned against me. It got really hot, very nasty. But I have quite thick skin in some ways. And at a certain point, it’s between you and your conscience. You go as close to the line as your conscience will permit in terms of producing material that pleases you. You’re working at the edge of risk, if you’re lucky. The writing can so easily go dead⁠—you want to feel some excitement when you’re in the room, some throbbing in the gristle. You want to hit the wave.

He studied the terrace around them, the satisfied diners, the officious servers in white and black like pretend Italians. Maybe the longing he felt was the longing one felt for God. To reach toward the divine not for pious reasons but for the solace of not being stranded inside yourself for the rest of your life.

I was still going to church at the ages of eighteen and nineteen, when I got back, but that was about the time I drifted away. It didn’t happen like a thunderclap. I lived in a strict household, and when my parents thought I was going to Mass, I’d walk down to the milk bar and sit there drinking a malted milk and reading a sporting paper until the hour was up. Then I’d walk home. I marvel at the fact that the religion that I was brought up in—all the talk of God and angels and eternal salvation—never reached the part of me that fiction and poetry reached. To get away from those beliefs of eighteen or nineteen years, I actually did have to be some kind of atheistic, Freudian sort of hedonistic person to start with. But I didn’t want to be a pagan—I didn’t want to run away from Catholicism to the opposite extreme. I learned the whole of A Shropshire Lad in my nineteenth year, and in Housman I found an alternative. I was sort of obsessed with it. The greens of England suggested not a vivid, red-colored, pagan sexuality and not the black-and-white certainties of Catholicism but the cultivation of the poetic emotions, as I would’ve called them. I suppose I had to grow up to learn that the realm, let’s call it, of poetry and fiction and horse racing and music was the utmost realm, that religion was just a man-made concept of a lower order, and that all the satisfaction I wanted from existence, from my own life, lay in the direction of poetry, fiction, music, and horse racing and not in the direction of religion, and that those states of being or feelings or states of awareness that came to me while I was reading poetry or fiction, or while I was watching or reflecting on horse races or listening to music or playing it, pointed in the direction that my life was going.