The Psychic Toll of Class Mobility

In 2018, scholars at the University of Padua examined the work of various writers from the same region as the celebrated author published under the pen name Elena Ferrante—hoping to determine, once and for all, her true identity. Comparing their lexicon and syntax, the researchers found the most striking overlap between Ferrante’s sentences and those of the prolific Naples-born novelist Domenico Starnone. Though the study acknowledges that “it is difficult to precisely define his role,” it concludes that “there is a good chance that Domenico Starnone knows ‘who is,’ or rather, ‘what is’ Elena Ferrante.” (Starnone has denied that he is the author behind Ferrante’s books.)

I prefer to leave the speculation to scholars in Padua. For readers who are content, as I am, to let the enigma of Elena Ferrante’s identity remain unsolved, Starnone’s potent early novel The House on Via Gemito is rewarding on its own terms. Starnone is a writer exquisitely attuned to class anxieties: As his later novels do, Via Gemito explores the emotional cost of class mobility, and the psychic toll of changing one’s speech patterns and behavior for the sake of social and financial gain.  

[Read: An open letter to Elena Ferrante—whoever you are]

In Starnone’s 2019 novel, Trust (published in English in 2021), the protagonist, Pietro, attributes his professional success to being “a flexible sort of person.” Like the narrator in Via Gemito, Pietro no longer lives in the working-class Neopolitan neighborhood of his childhood. He teaches literature in a public high school and tours the country, giving lectures on a book he’s recently published. He has learned to withhold any trace of Neapolitan intonation from his speech—a linguistic malleability that, he remarks, has “yielded excellent results.” The deeper question in Trust, as in Via Gemito, is whether one can achieve those results without compromising one’s integrity.

The House on Via Gemito won the prestigious Strega Prize in 2001, establishing Starnone as one of Italy’s foremost writers. But his work wasn’t widely known in English until Jhumpa Lahiri translated his novels Ties and Trick, as well as Trust, to great acclaim over the past decade. Oonagh Stransky’s vibrant new translation of Via Gemito is the first time this novel—longer and looser than Starnone’s later works—is available to readers in English.

The narrator in Via Gemito shares Starnone’s first name, shortened to Mimí, and like Starnone, he is a writer. (Starnone frequently includes flickers of his own reflection in his books; in Ties, for instance, the protagonist, Aldo, teaches literature in a public high school, as Starnone once did, and as Pietro does in Trust.) Mimí is deliberate about what aspects of his identity he projects to the world. He describes his outward persona as a “screen” of “courtesy, duty and impassivity” that he’s learned to wrap around himself in public. This ongoing performance has been integral to his literary success but has also estranged him from his siblings and everyone else from his working-class youth in Naples. Behind his carefully maintained facade of bourgeois restraint, Mimí exists in a state of acute private agony, consumed “with losing contact with my father and, consequently, my entire family.”

Via Gemito is the verbal exhuming of that estranged and now deceased father, Federí, as Mimí, now an adult, looks back on his childhood. A railway clerk by day, Federí would turn his family’s cramped apartment into an art studio at night. He insisted on repurposing the family’s one good bedsheet, stretching it out to create the large-scale canvas he couldn’t afford to buy. He lashed out at his wife frequently, calling her ignorant and vain, and, during one particularly fraught episode, burned her hair combs. Starnone leaves the hypocrisy implicit: Federí berating his wife for her vanity when his family’s survival depended on their willingness to accommodate his ego. If he left new paintings drying on their beds, they didn’t dare ask to move them.

Like any narcissist, Federí remained oblivious to any deprivations other than his own. When his wife became ill, Federí didn’t notice. He was too busy obsessing over the gatekeepers of the local art world, swearing about the “shitheads” who ignored his work and demeaned him at openings. Mimí regards each of his father’s obscenities as if they are beads on a string, what he calls “the rosary of my youth.” Despite his general impulsiveness, Federí was intentional with language: One of his greatest sources of pride was his ability to pronounce certain words with upper-class intonation. In one scene, Federí corrects his wife’s clipped articulation of pronto on the phone, gloating about his ability to pronounce the word like a highly educated person would.

For Federí, speech was one of the few areas of his life where he felt entirely in control, and Mimí inherits his father’s reverence for language as a form of self-determination. Starnone’s exacting approach to writing exhibits a similar faith that identifying precisely the right word might very well change his destiny. He scrubs every sentence to shiny perfection with a determined ferocity similar to that of Federí scrubbing the railroad grease from his hands before an art opening.

[Read: A novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going]

Mimi, too, keeps scrubbing away, determined to remove the traces of his working-class father. Unlike Federí, who burped in the faces of those who insulted or ignored him at art events, Mimí is outwardly impassive. But internally, his striving for literary acclaim is as fury-fueled as his father’s had been in Naples’s local art circles. In Starnone’s novels, releasing yourself from whatever bitterness consumed your parents is an ultimately futile pursuit. Like his father, Mimí remains painfully prone to humiliation for “an indefinite amount of time, maybe my whole life.”  

Nowhere is the emotional toll of his shapeshifting more clearly on display than in a scene from Mimí’s adolescence, when he begins to try on different voices and behaviors, and adopt the mannerisms of relatives and strangers. One day, he arrives at church wearing a tunic his mother has cut as short as a girl’s dress. There, he ends up performing the female part in a dance with a classmate, a muddling of gender roles that leaves him feeling so humiliated that he begins to see himself not as a physical form, but as “an intimate sigh, a moan.” Shame, this scene suggests, is a powerful psychic trap, and the only reliable way out is through acts of imagination. It’s a stirring memory for an adult male narrator to share, one that stayed with me as vividly as the wary gaze of the Neapolitan mastiff that Federí paints after dark, with its large muzzle and piercing eyes.