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(This sounds like it sucks big-time.)
NY Times, June 22 2017
Sex, Drugs and Marxism in ‘Class’
Books of The Times
By DWIGHT GARNER
Class
By Francesco Pacifico
341 pages. Melville House. $25.99.
Like Addie Bundren in William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and Susie
Salmon in Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” Daria, the narrator of
Francesco Pacifico’s second novel, “Class,” is dead.
Unlike Addie and Susie, Daria is (or was) a sexed-up Italian Marxist and
part-time literary critic, a devotee of club drugs and anal sex and the
novels of William Gaddis. She will criticize your clothes, your husband,
your movie, your ankles and then add, as if she were the ghost of Jeremy
Corbyn in stiletto heels, “your progressivism was unanchored from
theory” or “you deserve the center left!”
Daria is, like Pacifico’s novel, as bitter and aggressive as a glass of
Fernet Branca. I hated “Class” before I loved it and then hated it
again, yet suspect I might pull it off the shelf again soon. It’s about
young, amoral Italian hipsters in Manhattan and Brooklyn circa 2010, and
it’s plainly the work of a forceful and ambitious writer.
“Class” is a manifesto of contempt and its deformed twin, self-loathing.
It’s about young people who flicker across the globe, tucked under
blankets and Beats headphones in first-class seats, coasting on the
dwindling remains of their trust funds.
They write for Vice Italy and party at Gary Shteyngart’s apartment and
utter thought-bubbles like “Self-curate or die, right?” Loss, anguish,
guilt? These things are for the unbeautiful, the uneducated, the uncouth.
When it comes to this novel’s bracing chilliness, Pacifico knows what he
is doing, to paraphrase Marco Rubio’s callow remark about Barack Obama.
Embedded in “Class” is a critique of a dominant kind of American novel,
from writers like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace.
“These modern Americans are so good at making the reader feel human —
they think literature connects us all,” Daria comments. “They became
important under George W. Bush, these writers, emerging as an antidote
to his regime, so now they feel obligated to provide a model of absolute
virtue at all times to suppress every individual interest, to avoid
every class vice.”
This is a misreading of Franzen and Wallace (what do you expect from a
titillated green-eyed Marxist?), but you understand what Pacifico is
driving at. He intends to pull the moral rug from under his fiction, to
not place a thumb on the scale of human sympathy.
Life is pitiless and strange; only simpletons look for neat meanings. He
will observe his characters as if they are ants under a magnifying
glass. Sometimes, while viewing them, he will scorch them alive under
the midday sun.
Pacifico was born in Rome in 1977. His previous novel, “The Story of My
Purity” (2013), was about earnest and unlikable young Catholics facing
real-world temptations in Rome. He is also a translator of writers
including Dave Eggers and Dana Spiotta.
“The Story of My Purity” was translated into English by Stephen Twilley.
This new novel took a more elliptical path to American publication.
Written in Italian and rewritten in English, it was then “partially
rearranged, and heavily edited by the author and his editor, Mark
Krotov,” the copyright page states.
The result is tangled and lumpy — if this novel were a leg, it would
have varicose veins — but it features a strong and authentic voice, and
is like little else I’ve read in recent years.
Pacifico is a brainy tinkerer of the Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti variety
and generation, but there’s some Michel Houellebecq in him, too, that
French producer of stinky cheese, who said, “I doggedly, relentlessly
seek out that which is worst in me so I can set it, still quivering, at
the public’s feet.”
There are many characters in “Class,” hives of them, but the primary
ones are Ludovica and Lorenzo. They’re young marrieds who’ve moved to
Williamsburg from Rome so that Lorenzo, the butt of many of this book’s
jokes, can chase his dream of being a filmmaker, or at least of being an
assistant to Wes Anderson.
Pacifico is a canny observer of his characters and their world: the
status details; their Anglo-Italian slang; their lofty disdain. When he
writes about the young and hip and wealthy in Williamsburg, for example,
he adds: “The non-wealthy came here, too, of course. They came by bus,
like in ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ and their disguises could hold for a while,
but soon their money would run out, and they’d disappear.”
Back in Italy, Ludovica had helped run her family’s annoying bookstore,
where the volumes are shelved under titles like “inner trips” and
“what’s cookin’.” She is still finding herself, and totes a copy of
“Mrs. Dalloway” as if it were a talisman, “evidence that women have
souls even when they make mistakes.”
Irritated with her husband, his cheating and his dilettantish ways, she
falls into the nonstop orgy (of sex, of drugs, of caustic talk) at the
plush apartment of a well-connected journalist named Berengo, whose
Hefner-like pad offers spectacular and ever-changing views of The New
York Times building.
“Class” is a sex-drenched novel, in close touch with animal instincts.
Large penises are fetishized; so are women’s backsides. (Daria: She’s
hot, she’s sexy and she’s dead.)
“So this is America,” Ted Hughes thought as he made love to Sylvia Plath
for the first time. Pacifico’s characters, too, feel for this country’s
intellectual seams with their appetites.
This essentially plotless novel drags in its final third. Like some rock
concerts, even some good rock concerts, I couldn’t wait for it to end.
The novel builds to a prank on Lorenzo, the filmmaker, but it’s a
throwaway piece of theatrical cruelty.
The final sections lack the bandwidth, the fatness of feeling and the
complex sense of themes raked together that the best novels (even
plotless novels) deliver.
About Berengo we read, in what seems like an executive summary of this
vinegary novel, “His soul hurt, and so did his crotch.”
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