The hypnotic quality of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies comes in part from watching the brackish waters of moral complicity rise around the unnamed narrator, and in part from that narrator’s guarded, mysterious interiority. She leaves out so much in telling the story. Sometimes a book holds back its secrets until late in the story, as part of the narrative tension, but here the restraint is not in the timing of revelations. Those withheld secrets seem to come from Kitamura’s decision about what readers need to know. Or maybe we only learn what the narrator can stand to tell us. Either way, the strategy eliminates so much unnecessary explanation. Questions that come up for me: What is unnecessary? What in a particular novel is necessary and why? How does the strategy of withholding relate to a book’s themes, aesthetic, and project as a whole?