City, by Alessandro Baricco. Alfred A. Knopf. 326 pages. $25.
Alessandro Baricco, the bestselling author of Silk and popular Italian television personality, has a reputation for blurring the boundaries between substance and showmanship, and does so with postmodern braggadocio in his new novel, City. (Braggadocio, bravura: It's tempting to note these words are all Italian, even in English.) Surely our expectations of a "novel" are different from those of a "novelty," but it's hard to say why - nor is it clear whether City is essentially one or the other.
City is an interweaving of tales of and by two talented fantasists. The first is a lonely 13-year-old boy, Gould, whose life has been essentially stolen by schools' labeling him a genius destined for the Nobel Prize. He pals around with two comic- book-character imaginary friends, a deaf-mute and a giant, and spends his time in the toilet fantasizing an elaborately detailed series of boxing matches. The other is 30-year-old Shatzy Shell, who is concocting a Western, or series of Westerns, about a place called Closingtown, featuring a pair of trigger-happy spinsters, an old gunfighter desperate to reach his destined but long-delayed death in a shootout, and an extremely interesting stopped clock on which the plot turns.
Shatzy and Gould's joint story begins when Gould, essentially parentless, takes on Shatzy, who needs a job, as his governess. These two understand one another perfectly: They allow their parallel fantasies to weave around each other and in and out of their everyday lives, where not very much happens, until Gould disappears rather than fulfil his prescribed role as a genius. (He turns up working as a restroom attendant.)
Probably too clever by at least a third, this is a novel in which characters don't relate to others, but dream colorful dreams and deliver brilliant and ridiculous monologues.
Too long, these monologues are, yet often truly inspired: about Monet's Waterlilies revealing "the objective superiority of the state of pain as the conditio sine qua non of a superior perception of the world"; about the Western front porch representing the psyche of man, in exile from himself and defending his life from the world; about the oxymoron of "intellectual honesty." My favorite is about the naturally determined meandering of rivers (and lives): "the least you can expect is that it's more or less the same for us, and that all this sliding to one side and then the other, as if we were crazy, or worse, lost, is actually our way of going straight."
It is a novel in which an ironic posture holds both a kind of insufferable arrogance and a kind of sympathetic insight.
Superbly translated by Ann Goldstein, who has wisely preserved the book's quirkiness and syntactical Italian excess, giving its language a slightly bent quality, City is also a provocative document of an Italian love-hate relationship with America: our filthy/lovely rest stops, the absurdist extremes of our buy-one-get-one-free consumerism, our manic creative energies and violence, our genius and childishness, our cartoons and Westerns, our relative lack of family bonds or parental supervision (Gould's father is in the military, his mother in a mental hospital).
A world, perhaps, where a fantasy life is much more preoccupying than the real, and narcissistic monologue, not conversation, the dominant form of interaction. It has its charms, doesn't it?
Alane Salierno Mason is an editor at W. W. Norton & Co., and translator of Elio Vittorini's Conversations in Sicily, published by New Directions.