Gino is one of those troubled young men who might be called wayward, but that implies he\u2019s strayed from a path he can see, when it would be more accurate to say he\u2019s way-free, adrift, rudderless. In his early 20s, he returns home to the Abruzzo region of Italy. At loose ends, and spurred on by the laconic, accomplished father he resents and can\u2019t impress, Gino seeks out a childhood friend, Franca, who as a little girl new to the town announced to Gino that someday they would be married. It\u2019s as though she\u2019s been waiting for him. Immediately, in a way that seems simultaneously improbable and inevitable, they fall in love and marry. Franca gets pregnant. They move into a remote, lovely house. But Gino\u2014fragile, self-doubting, distrustful of anything that feels like good fortune since how could he deserve it\u2014begins to deteriorate when their son is born. The baby, Elio, is extraordinarily beautiful; everyone remarks on it, and as his legend grows, people start showing up at the house\u2014eventually by the busload\u2014to catch a glimpse of him. What could be the source of this beauty, Gino wonders. Surely not himself. He fixates on the married lover Franca had before Gino\u2019s return, an unpleasant and possibly Mafia-connected concrete contractor, begins stalking him, and the family idyll ends soon and badly. The prolific and versatile Thomson here offers a low-key, somber, sometimes lyrical novel about ordinary people. It\u2019s not densely plotted, not filled with large-scale twists; the novelist relies instead on meticulous detail, on compelling portraiture. The result is a slow-motion psychological train wreck of a book. We watch things unravel in just the way that\u2019s been foretold, and we feel surprised despite ourselves.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gino is one of those troubled young men who might be called wayward, but that implies he\u2019s strayed from a path he can see, when it would be more accurate to say he\u2019s way-free, adrift, rudderless. In his early 20s, he returns home to the Abruzzo region of Italy. At loose ends, and spurred on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6666"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}