Swimming to Elba by Silvia Avallone

Try to imagine a steel mill that takes up 2,500 acres of land, three miles of factory fence behind which are acres of decaying buildings and smokestacks, most of them ruined or partly ruined—a place that once employed 20,000 people, but in 2001 is reduced to a skeleton of its former self, with only one of its four giant towers still belching toxic clouds of bluish fluorescences, named simply A-Fo 4; A-Fo 1,2, and 3 now mostly just piles of rusting metal.

 …the posthumous carcasses of the three blast furnaces that hadn’t yet been dismantled, and, down there at the far end, the coke oven where men shoveled coal by hand, by arm, as if it were still the nineteenth century. 

There was no sky. There was an aviary: the purple flames of the furnaces; the swinging arms of the cranes; the tons of metal slung from the hooks beneath the hoisting tackle. The endless rows of sheds, workshops, bunkers. A self-sufficient obsession. The smokestacks, both active and extinct. Overhead, the constant crackling of flames: purple, red, black. The arms of hammerhead cranes  swinging around, yellow, green, tons of metal whirling like birds, yellow clouds of carbon smoke, black at the mouths of the smokestacks. It’s called continuous integrated steel production.

This is the setting for Silvia Avallone’s best selling Italian novel, Swimming to Elba, although the meaning of her one-word Italian title is simply STEEL. I have to admit that I picked it up simply to see what a best-selling Italian novel would consist of, totally unprepared for the powerful social-political statement I was about to encounter. 

On the face of it, this is a simple novel about two inseparable teenage girls, thirteen, almost fourteen—both beautiful, and both convinced that “the world arrives when you are fourteen.” Anna is dark and brave and intelligent, Francesca blond and incredibly beautiful, both are admired and envied not only by their peers, but by the hungry adult steel mill workers and their already old at thirty or forty wives.

An expert eye would have immediately sensed that this kind of beauty lasts for only a moment in the course of a lifetime. But in that crowd there were no expert eyes.

The two girls live in a factory town at the edge of the sea in one of a set of huge concrete barracks that had been constructed forty years earlier by public housing authority when government was in the hands of Christian Democrats and Italian Communists. 

…the public housing authority had built the giant barracks lining the beaches for the workers at the steel mills. Even metalworkers, according to the views of the local Communist administration, had the right to an apartment with a view. A view of the sea, not a view of the factory.

While much of this novel is aimed at revealing the sad lives of the women and girls who are the abused girlfriends and wives of the metalworkers, it is clear that Avalonne is also fascinated by and sympathetic towards the boys and men who live and work inside of the mills—a world that no one outside can really understand. Certainly, she is critical of the rich bosses who profit from the blood and lives of the men who work in the bowels of the factory, owners who would never deign to dirty themselves in the nearly inconceivable conditions inside, and who are willing to shutdown, downsize, and outsource at the whims of world market economies. But her fascination with the entire process of making steel and with the history of the industry is much more complex than her mistrust of an economic system that exploits the workers. 

Twenty-eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit is the melting point of steel alloy. Steel doesn’t exist in nature, it’s not an elementary substance. It’s a secretion of thousands of human hands, electric meters, mechanical arms, and every so often the skin of a cat that’s tumbled into the molten alloy. 

Although there is a large cast of characters in the book, it is the stories of Francesca and Anna, and of their two families, that provide the main focus. Anna’s mother, Sandra, is socially and politically informed, active in communist party politics, and eager for her daughter to get an education and escape the cycle of poverty and abuse of most of the women around her. Sandra is disappointed that her son, Alessio, has already given up on any life outside the mill, and is destined to a life of running one of the huge cranes that move the metal in various of its incarnations. Her husband has escaped the factory, but only by turning to criminal activities in the hopes of providing a better life for his wife and children. Francesca’s father, Enrico, a giant of a man, who left the poor life of rural farming to make his fortune in the mills, spends his time worrying about his too-beautiful daughter, and flying into rages that lead to beatings of his long-abused wife, Rosa, and of Francesca. “Just an ordinary man who had left the country with a rucksack on his shoulders to come to the city.”

As the two girls grow up, they dream someday of crossing the water to Elba, the rich sister city and tourist destination that seems to hold the answers to their dreams. Francesca, who loves Anna not simply as a sister, but secretly as a would-be lover, is contemptuous of and nauseated by the attentions she receives from the boys and grown men who constantly undress her with their eyes; she hopes that her beauty will both provide an escape from her present life and win her Anna’s love. Anna understands that her beauty, alone, will not save her. She sees the strength of her mother, and at least on some level takes in the message that only education and coming to understand the social realities can help her to a better life.

This is a powerful book. While it may have become a best seller at least partly because of the titillation of peeking into the lives of two beautiful girls who are on the cusp of women-hood, its ultimate appeal rests on the lucidity of Avalonne’s understanding of the world around her. There is so much of interest in this book that my comments have, at best, merely scratched the surface. Let me close with a quote from the book that summarizes Avallone’s own questions about her characters and the industrial city in which she was raised.

What does it mean to grow up in a complex of four big tenements shedding sections of balconies and chunks of asbestos into a courtyard where little kids play alongside older kids dealing drugs and old people who reek of decay? What kind of vision do you get of the world in a place where it’s normal not to go anywhere on vacation, not to go to the movies, not to know anything about the world, to never read the newspaper, to never read a book, and that’s just how life is? The two of them, in this place, sought each other out, chose each other.

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

I’ve often wondered what it must be like for a writer to suddenly, unexpectedly, have a book explode into a best-seller and prize winner. Wonderful, no doubt, for the moment, but what about when s/he returns to the hard work of writing another book? We know in retrospect that it had a paralyzing effect on J.D. Salinger when Catcher in the Rye zoomed to fame, and the success of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man seems also to have had a similar effect on his subsequent writing. Elizabeth Strout cannot have expected her little book, Olive Kitteridge, to become a best seller, let alone win a Pulitzer, but her success has not led to anxious inactivity. Her 2013 novel, The Burgess Boys, is a wonderful book told in the same straight-forward and simple way as her earlier works. 

Most of the novel is set in a small town in Maine, Shirley Falls, and is about people who live quite ordinary lives. Like the great short story writer, Alice Munro, Strout seems intent on showing her readers that what appear from the outside to be quite ordinary lives are, viewed from inside, and through the eyes of a compassionate and wise story-teller, quite extraordinary. 

As the title tells us, the story revolves around two boys-become-men, Jim and Bob, the Burgess boys. Jim has become both rich and famous, first as a small-town prosecuting attorney, then as a defense attorney who takes on the case of a famous rock star accused of murder, and finally as a member of a prestigious New York law firm that specializes, in Jim’s words, in white-collar crime. Bob, the younger brother, is a legal aid attorney who lives in the shadow of Jim’s fame, idolizing his older brother, but verbally and emotionally abused and belittled by him. Of the three Burgess children, only Bob’s twin sister, Susan, has remained in Shirley Falls, and it is a thoughtless and silly act of her high-school aged son, Zach, that brings the Burgess boys back to Maine and to a confrontation with a tragic accident from their past that left them fatherless and mired in guilt.

To me, what shines forth in this novel is Strout’s compassion and moral insight, not only in her understanding of the Burgess children and the past that unites them, but her understanding of how small towns in America have suffered from economic downturns and the flight of young people from such towns to the big cities. Add to this flight a rather sudden influx of displaced people from a different culture, and the story begins to take shape.

The displaced people in this case are Somalis, driven out of their own country by wars, and then escaped from camps that are as or more dangerous than the country they have fled, and finally to this (and other) small American towns where they huddle together for safety. The reader can hear Strout wondering about how odd and frightening it must be for people who, for the most part, don’t speak the language, whose dress and diet and lifestyle are radically different than those of the people they are quite suddenly thrown into daily contact with. Difficult, certainly for the immigrants, but difficult also for the townspeople who find these strangers in their midst, who both desire and shun assimilation. 

The silly and senseless act that forces a kind of showdown in this little Maine town is Zach’s prank of throwing a frozen pig’s head into the makeshift Mosque the Somali’s use for community prayer. Zach is so ignorant of the ways and culture of the Somalis that have flooded his little town that he doesn’t even understand significance for them of the pig’s head. Why did he choose a pig’s head? Because, he explains to his attorney uncles, there were no cow or sheep heads at the slaughterhouse where his friend works and from which he stole the head. He had meant at first to use the head in a Halloween prank, but various complications have led to an alternative act that, quite apart from his intentions, have sinister implications and draw national, even international scrutiny and serious charges of a hate-crime.

Although the plot could have been treated in sensational ways, and in other hands, the novel could have been layered with mystery and violence, I was not surprised that Strout reins in the sensationalism. She is what I call a quiet writer, concerned less with outward action and mystery than in the internal monologues of her characters. And she talks not only through the Burgess boys; she also gives us inside views from Helen, Jim’s wife, from Pam, Bob’s ex-wife, Susan, the little sister, and for brief snatches even the inner lives of some of the Somali characters. Like Olive Kitteridge, which is really a series of short stories that are tied together by an appearance of Olive in each story, this novel, too, reads like a series of stories. And it seems that each story could have been a novel in its own right. 

The violence in the story is really limited to the verbal attacks and abusive language of Jim, usually directed towards his adoring younger brother, or his abandoned little sister, or his unfortunate and naïve nephew. It is obvious that Strout has known men like Jim, and even her treatment of him is, in the end, compassionate; she wants her reader to understand his excesses, and provides mitigating if not exculpating circumstances for his temper flairs. 

Although this novel has already gotten a lot of press and has been named one of the best books of the year by prestigious journals, I can’t say that I would rank it with her Pulitzer winner, Olive Kitteridge. She seems intent on finding and showing some level of development for each of her characters, some form of enlightenment or redemption. For me, this results in a kind of sentimental summing up, a packaging in the end that is a bit too neat, too sweet. That said, I am certainly glad to have read it, and I eagerly await any other offerings she has for us. She is a superb story-teller and a deeply insightful social commentator. There is a goodness and sincerity that literally shines through her work, and there are few who can match her word-weaving skills.

Look At Me by Jennifer Egan

To what extent is image tied to identity? Would others see me as the same person were my image to change markedly? Would I? These are a few of the questions Jennifer Egan asks in her complex and ambitious novel, Look At Me. Chances are if you’ve heard of Egan, it is because of her 2011 Pulitzer winning novel, A Visit from the Good Squad; today I want to talk about her earlier 2002 novel Look At Me, which I see as even richer and more philosophically interesting than her prize winner, though both are superb. 

There are so many characters in this novel, each narrator of his or her story, that it’s almost difficult to pick a lead character. And yet certainly it is the model, Charlotte Swenson, who is the pivot point. The reader meets Charlotte shortly after she has been involved in a horrific auto accident, one in which she is pulled from the burning wreck by a good Samaritan, and then quite literally put back together. Her broken arm, leg, and ribs almost incidental to the reconstructive work on her face whose crushed bones are reassembled with eighty titanium screws and then another surgery a year later to fine-tune her broken face.

For reasons the reader will learn as s/he reads the book, the accident occurs close to Charlotte’s hometown of Rockford Illinois, where much of the subsequent action occurs, although Charlotte returns as quickly as she can to her New York apartment and hopefully to her life as a model. Apparently, the reconstructive surgery is remarkably successful in that she is still a beautiful woman, but she soon discovers that she is literally unrecognizable to the circle of models and agents whom she has lived amongst for well over a decade. 

…I’d postponed…reckoning with the world for the simple reason that I still didn’t know what I looked like. I’d spent as long as an hour staring through the ring of chalky light around my bathroom mirror; I’d held up old pictures of myself beside my reflection and tried to compare them. But my sole discovery was that in addition to not knowing what I looked like now, I had never known. The old pictures were no help; like all good pictures, they hid the truth. I had never kept a bad one—this was one of my cardinal rules, photographically speaking. One: never let someone take your picture until you’re ready, or the result will almost certainly be awful. Two: never keep bad pictures of yourself for any reason, sentimental or otherwise. Bad pictures reveal you in exactly the light you wish never to be seen, and not only will they be found, if you keep them, but invariably by the single person in the world you least want to see you that way.

The question of identity, of how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others, is crucial in this tale not only for Charlotte, the model, where image is everything, but for all of the other main characters as well. Moose, the older brother of Charlotte’s childhood friend Ellen, metamorphoses from an easygoing, dashing and sought after athlete in high school into a morose and enigmatic professor understood by none, and shunned by most because of his startling and unpredictable behavior. He wanders his hometown of Rockford seeing the future by studying the past of this one-time industrial hub reduced now to a kind of ghost of its former self. Muttering the phrase, “We are what we see,” and fascinated by the invention of clear glass in the 1300s, he searches for someone to whom he can pass on his insights, his foresight, his scorching epiphanies. “For Moose had sensed that a terrible reversal was in progress, a technological disaster whereby the genius of the Industrial Revolution would be turned on people themselves, whereby human beings would be assembled from parts just as guns and boots and bicycles had been once.”

Moose thinks perhaps his niece, Charlotte, almost certainly named after his sister’s childhood friend, is a candidate for carrying on his nearly unbearable prophesies. But it turns out that the sixteen year old Charlotte is attempting to find her own identity by starting up a sexual relationship with a much older man who is himself a shadowy figure whose identity is less certain, more plastic, than either of the Charlottes, or, for that matter, than anyone else he encounters. 

Add to the list of identity casualties an alcoholic private detective, cut loose from his past by events he refuses to disclose, and the cast of characters is almost complete.  Egan mixes in one more, a reporter who wants to interview Charlotte not because of an interest in fashion, but as an instance of a person whose appearance has changed drastically. 

I’m interested in the relationship between interior and exterior, how the world’s perception of women affect our perceptions of ourselves. A model whose appearance has changed drastically is a perfect vehicle, I think, for examining the relationship among image, perception and identity, because a model’s position as a purely physical object—a media object, if you will—is in a sense just a more exaggerated version of everyone’s position in a visually based, media-driven culture, and so watching a model renegotiate a drastic change in her image could prove a perfect lens…

What is personal identity? What is the truth, about the past, about the future, about ourselves? And who is discover and untangle it? 

There is so much in this book that I cannot in a short space even begin to lay out the issues, the mysteries, the questions. And to add a final element to the tangle, there is a character named simply Z who is adept in languages, changes identities as easily as changing a coat, and who remains always in the shadows. He has come to this country from somewhere, no one knows quite where, searching for the conspirators and for the plan of subjugation that allow America to rule the world. Finally in America, “standing in their midst, {he} felt the peculiar dizzying pleasure of hating a thing so purely you’ll do anything to destroy it, anything, a pleasure that was indistinguishable from the wish to be destroyed himself. Consumed.” 

A mystery, a tragedy, and in some remarkable ways a comedy as well—this is an excellent novel written in language that is as sharp-edged and contemporary as the world she describes. It is a fine example of my favorite sort of fiction, stories about us, here, now.