Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet

by Frederic Raphael, Joseph Epstein

This delightful book of writer-to-writer correspondence joins a full shelf of volumes in the genre, yet it is perhaps the first set of such letters ever transacted via the Internet. Also unusual, at least for correspondents in the twenty-first century, is that Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein have never met, nor even spoken to each other. But what is most rare about this book is the authors' abundant talent for entertaining their readers, as much when the topic is grave as when it is droll. Raphael and Epstein agree to embark on a year-long correspondence, but other rules are few. As the weeks progress, their friendship grows, and each inspires the other. Almost any topic, large or small, is they write of schooling, parents, wives, children, literary tastes, enmities, delights, and beliefs. They discuss their professional lives as writers, their skills or want of them, respective experiences with editors, producers, and actors, and, in priceless passages scattered throughout the letters, they assess such celebrated figures as Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, Annie Leibowitz, Malcolm Gladwell, Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Harold Pinter, Isaiah Berlin, George Weidenfeld, and Robert Gottlieb, among many others. Epstein and Raphael capture a year in their letters, but more, they invite us into an intimate world where literature, cinema, and art are keys to self-discovery and friendship.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 8, 2013

About the author

Writer, critic and broadcaster, Frederic Raphael was educated at Charterhouse School and at St John's College, Cambridge. He has written several screenplays and fifteen novels. His The Glittering Prizes was one of the major British and American television successes of the 1970s.

Reviews

[Mary Keroson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this for a book challenge from 2015 , which was to read a book with bad reviews. This book deserves the rating!

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delicious correspondence about people, literature, religion, publishing, movies, society, life, etc, with not a few funny bits.

Notes:
6 ... baggy-pants term?
Sontag's extremely unimportant subject of camp
31 ... only schmucks work for someone else --- torture to have one's destiny in the hands of idiots, bullies, and peckerheads
68 ... no memorial service, prefer no crapola be spoken about my many fine deeds
75 ... Irish sporting pages
77 ... the oubliette, where decent, literary men filed their copy
129 ... CliveJames.com
131 ... Fabulous Small Jews
158 ... heard-it-from-a-Marine ... bonk in the ear
161 ... good looks and intellect don't go together ... unnecessary to spend long days in dusty stacks
167 ... Arguably Epstein (essayist)
179 ... cricket a draw is entertaining
189 ... schmucklheimer Cronkite
223 ... joke "shouldn't be a total loss" ($10 theft)
232 ... Tina Brown ... admirable spirit ... Honor the complexity ... major criterion
237 ... Montaigne, the French Epstein
241 ... avoid getting things wrong
248 ... childless couples touching and affectionate
251 ... Zorba's full catastrophe

Recommended by Kurp https://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.co...
"If the prospect of spending a few hours in the company of two smart, well-read, worldly, plain-speaking, enthusiastically funny friends sounds attractive, please read Distant Intimacy. You’ll laugh and you might, for a moment, entertain the hope that literary culture is not quite extinct."

[Imlac · Rating 1 out of 5]

Two old curmudgeons sourly snarking at everybody while fulsomely fawning on each other. Not an uplifting spectacle.

[Alan Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dust jacket for the hardcover edition of this book (unusually reasonable at $20.29 from Amazon)begins by describing it as a "delightful book of writer-to-writer correspondence ...transacted via the Internet." It closes by saying that "Epstein and Raphael ...invite us into an intimate world where literature, cinema and art are keys to self-discovery and friendship." What it fails to mention--and it's surely intentional because it's impossible to avoid--is the tenor of the "correspondence." In an age where "judgmental" is pejorative, these very literate and successful men judge everyone, and many of their critiques are, shall we say, unkind. It's a sort of two-man cafe table at the Algonquin Hotel. Highly entertaining, but not for the faint of heart.