In Search of Self through the Other: On Domenico Starnone's "Trust"

Domenico Starnone, transl. Jhumpa Lahiri | Trust | Europa Editions | 2021 | 144 Pages

The premise of Domenico Starnone’s novel Trust—a teacher’s life-changing affair with his former student—might suggest to the wary reader a familiar story of predator and prey. Starnone isn’t interested in writing neatly into the roles conferred by power and age, but it fits he’s chosen a relationship inflated with a familiar hysteria and managed to make it newly gruesome. Starnone is, after all, a master at unveiling the hideousness of romance. 

Trust opens with an experiment in vulnerability: after a brutal fight, two lovers exchange dark secrets. The goal of this radical exposure goes quickly awry when the pair break up a few days later. Pietro, the novel’s protagonist, will marry, have children, enjoy recognition as a popular author and accomplished academic, but live in dread that his ex-lover and former student, Teresa, will eventually betray his trust. 

His fear isn’t merely the frenzied paranoia of a guilty conscience—Teresa makes her power and its possible repercussions known. When Pietro gives an important speech, Teresa shows up in the audience. “There she was, there was no escape, wherever I went, she’d find a way to remind me of who I was.” She makes the subtext of her attendance explicit when she joins Pietro for a drink, and offers an unusual proposal. “We’ll get married. We’ll have a kind of wedding that’s not religious, or even a civil ceremony but, how should we define it? Ethical.” What follows is more ominous: “If one of us gets out of line, the other has the right to say to anyone at all: I’ll tell you who that man really is, who that woman really is.” 

It’s a proposition that makes Pietro squirm. And yet, this “ethical marriage” sticks, even as Pietro remains legally wed to Nadia. Pietro refashions himself into an exemplary teacher, son, citizen; he becomes exceedingly generous to even his worst students, courteously entertains his pedantic father-in-law’s lectures, and lavishes attention on his overlooked colleagues. Teresa is not ancillary to this undertaking so much as the gravitational force that drags it all into place. Calling her his “phantom consort,” Pietro goes so far as to say, “I was beginning to feel more married to Teresa than Nadia.”  

As with Starnone’s other male narrators, appearances are deceptive—it is not the way Pietro operates in the world that disturbs us as readers, but what one senses that he lacks in his most intimate relations. While most of the world showers praise on Pietro, his wife, Nadia, transforms from adoring lover to needling antagonist. We have a sense this has to do with her star falling as Pietro’s rises: Nadia was meant to be the celebrated academic, Pietro to teach English in high school. She can’t manage their reversal of fortunes. Over the course of the novel, her disappointment melts from red hot anger to reluctant acceptance, and she plays the wifely role with increasing fluidity. But she remains mostly inscrutable to the reader—as she does to Pietro, sometimes at her own insistence. 

It was impossible, for days, to get her to tell me what had happened. When she decided to talk to me—her face was extremely pale—she said:

—I’ve parted ways with the University. 

—That’s what you always say. 

—This time I mean it. 

—Why?

—That’s my business. 

—Your business is my business. 

—No. Each person minds his or her own business. They’re categories that are, inevitably, quite separate. Please don’t ask me any more questions. 

Pietro obliges; perhaps, in fact, he was the one to have orchestrated their psychological separation in the first place. As Pietro puts it, he has always held himself back, “so as not to irritate her and not have to contend with the woman she really was.” This instinct to evade one’s closest relations recurs in Starnone’s men; earlier works like Ties and Trick, both translated by Jhumpa Lahiri, deal with the growing estrangement of husband from wife, grandfather from grandchild. In place of a desire to merge or move closer to the other, Starnone’s men instead insist on their steely reserve, their inner remove.  

This pairing of emotionally distant men and quietly aggrieved women will register as familiar to readers of an anonymous author to whom Starnone has been persuasively connected: Elena Ferrante. In 2016, the investigative journalist Claudio Gatti dug up financial records tying Ferrante’s profits to Starnone’s wife, the Italian translator and writer Anita Raja. But the extreme similarities in style between Starnone and Ferrante, as outlined in an explosion of scholarly and popular articles, including an exhaustively argued piece published in Lit Hub last year, suggest Starnone is likely behind Ferrante—or, as some have proposed, Ferrante is a partnership between Starnone, Raja, and possibly others.

The Ferrante-Starnone connection appears quite explicitly in certain novels: Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment and Starnone’s Ties each tell a strikingly similar story of marital separation, one narrated by wife, the other by husband. In these two novels, wife and husband appear in the other’s pages mostly mute, remaining mysterious to one another and the reader. The result is a sense of intense difference: the gender essentialist notion, somewhat unpopular today, that the way in which men and women are brought up in the world erects an unbreachable divide. (This ideology is part of what makes the possible connection between Starnone and Ferrante particularly bewildering.) 

For both writers, gender is inexorably interwoven with Naples, the shared location of their childhoods, a place of capricious allegiances and intense violence that will haunt them throughout adulthood.

In Trust, Naples plays a shadowy but critical role; it’s the environment in which Pietro becomes terrified of himself. Recalling his childhood—the constant quarreling of his parents, his father’s jealous outbursts and mother’s enraged defenses—Pietro remembers thinking at eight or nine, “If she’s a whore… he shouldn’t just yell at her, he should kill her. And if she’s not, he needs to stop tormenting her, or I’ll grab the bread knife and kill him in his sleep.” Slowly, Pietro recognizes he has inherited his parents’ capacity for cold, ferocious contempt: “my mother had read something in my eyes, or maybe in the way my lips were turned, and she told me I frightened her. I was frightening? Me?” Naples’ violence, for Pietro, is no longer circumscribed by its physical borders; it has wormed its way inside, and now flourishes in the interior. 

Ferrante’s Naples is also a place of intimate cruelty, where any relationship may suddenly, and inexplicably, shift. In My Brilliant Friend, the first novel of the Neapolitan Quartet, Lila, the narrator’s charismatic best friend, begins to register these myriad personal betrayals as physical disruptions. In these moments—such as when, in a fit of rage, her father pushes her out of a window, or when her beloved brother starts imitating the wealthy, fascistic Solara brothers—she feels the outlines of people waver and reveal what she calls their “dissolving margins.”

How to manage such extreme precarity? For Elena, the Neapolitan Quartet’s narrator, the answer is to seek stability in the other; when she marries Nino, a withdrawn and brilliant writer, he becomes “a nucleus from which to expand outside the neighborhood and through the world.” 

Pietro’s attempt to flee from his own childhood—and the frightening shape it has taken in him—isn’t all that different. In this effort, he doesn’t turn to Nadia but to Teresa to play the wifely role. Towards the end of the novel, Teresa, who narrates the novel’s final chapter, offers an alternative history of her and Pietro’s “ethical marriage.” As she tells it, Pietro suggested the arrangement: “He, not I, was the one who gave name to our bond, and who kept writing to me, obsessively, and keeping me abreast of all that he did… He acted as if he was sure that the two of us, together but apart, could keep each other in check.”

Starnone’s men may be more liable to disappear, to withdraw, to slink back to the bounds of self. Still, like Ferrante’s women, they desperately seek relief from Naples in the other. Perhaps this is why, even as their mutual hatred simmers, Starnone’s men and Ferrante’s women rarely divorce or permanently split. They will stick together and they will be disappointed: love offers no comfort from childhood suffering, no sanctuary from old shame, and fails to satisfy their fiercest desire, to give structure to their lives in place of an infinite, bewildering expanse. 

Love isn’t up to the job, so what’s left? Starnone’s protagonists tend to find their answer in artistic pursuits: they are almost all writers, academics, painters. It is in their creative endeavors that they begin to feel themselves to be a force in the world, rather than pushed around by another’s unknowable whims. In Trust, one senses every sentence is a last recourse for Pietro, a final attempt to escape the debilitating sense of precarity conveyed to him by Naples, to make sense, meaning, and coherence, and such pressure delivers a propulsive tension—just another reason Trust makes for exhilarating reading.