Perhaps the greatest risk a male author can take nowadays is to write about women and his relationship with the finer sex, but Francesco Pacifico has gleefully taken it upon himself to kick the literary hornet’s nest. With The Women I Love, the Italian novelist, whose two previous novels have been translated into English, has written a bawdy and melancholic novel about the perpetual struggle between the masculine and the feminine, with a surprisingly deft, yet harsh, touch.
Marcello, the published poet/editor who’s “too much of a snob to do much of anything,” is the novel’s narrator, signaling that The Women I Love is yet another one of those books in which fact and fiction are indecipherably tangled. The familiar literary ingredients, the highly self-aware narrator and upper-class social dynamics, are present in the novel, but what separates it from the usual Brooklyn-esque autofictional fare is Pacifico’s willingness to attack his subjects (and Marcello) with a veracity that usually evades such novels.
Most books that traffic in a high-literary pitch create distance between the writer and his material. But Pacifico’s usage of literary conceits, such as when he intersperses “editorial notes” into passages, helps the author dig deeper into his own experiences. The Women I Love, as its title suggests, details Marcello’s relationships with the women he’s loved and how these rocky and complicated affairs have shaped him not only as a man but as an intellectual. The five women in The Women I Love, two of whom are Marcello’s mother and sister, are granted their own section, and it is through this structure, each woman’s peculiarities and dysfunctions forcing Marcello to confront his own limitations, that readers are given access to how a man is created by the ladies of his life.
The novel is a very Rothian undertaking, certainly of a literary style that has its fair share of detractors, mostly female, but the truth is that men are shaped by the seminal female figures in their lives. What separates Pacifico from your prototypical lit bro is his understanding that even if he imbues his female characters with total agency, male self-delusion will always lead to blind spots: “Is a man’s prose a women’s beauty contest? I can feel it, that everything leads to me lining up women, then holding up cards with a number from one to ten. If I force myself to stop rating them, is there anything left? Or is a man’s prose nothing more than a fancy cow auction, with the best cows picked? And if I refrain from this, is there anything left?” What materializes from this meta understanding is a highly neurotic narrator in Marcello who often comes off in a far worse light than the women who induce his neuroses.
The first section of the novel, “Eleonera,” whose namesake, a talented and budding editor with “a beauty like a faded leaf,” is Marcello’s object of great infatuation. Marcello meets Eleonera while in a relationship with his future wife, Barbara, and it’s through her that we learn of the indecisiveness and immaturity that has hampered him — and will continue to do so until he finally grows up. The theme of male maturity, and if it’s even possible for the type of intellectual who seeks perpetual aesthetic and sexual novelty to mature, is one of the novel’s main driving forces. Marcello, a literary man, if nothing else, with a penchant for pathological reminiscing, is seeking to purge himself of his immaturity by documenting his great loves, but his prose betrays him: “Writing this, I can feel the old knot in my throat when I traveled to Milan in the weeks before we’d become lovers and I felt the pleasure, not yet contaminated by sex, of having discovered a treasure hidden in plain sight, where no one thought to stop and pick it up.” This act of discovering and the pleasure of its newness is what Marcello loves, and when his object of discovery loses its shimmer, he turns to the rekindling properties of memory-induced fictionization and experiences the newness yet again. The fact that Marcello understands his motivations doesn’t absolve him, not that he’s looking for absolution, but the novel succeeds because it captures this circuitous nostalgic loop in all its self-indulgent glory. This is what it’s like being a literary romantic of dubious moral makeup, Marcello tells himself and his readers. The gimmick works.
The novel’s second and longest section is titled “Barbara” and details Marcello’s courtship with the fiery actress who later becomes his wife. In a lovely and cinematic scene, Marcello catches his first glimpse of Barbara onstage as she works out on an exercise bike: “She pedaled away until she was breathless, singing the whole time, an Italian song I can’t remember, a melody that rose and fell, like one of those blow-up dancers in shopping-center parking lots: her voice, competent but untrained, so charming and enthusiastic, made me really want to meet her.” They meet, of course, and have a seemingly no-strings-attached one-night stand. But then Barbara, the novel’s moral engine and the lone character who truly challenges Marcello, speaks up: “The poor girl who ever marries you. How will things ever go back to normal after the seduction?”
A fair share of female readers will find plenty that is “problematic” with The Women I Love, but the truth of the matter is that it is Marcello, and not the female characters, who comes across like a foolish brute. It’s Barbara, and not Marcello, mind you, who perfectly predicts the fallout of their affair. Marcello is a master of seduction and of offering up finely curated moments of fleeting romanticism. But as Barbara predicts, and later finds out herself, he’s a failure as a long-term partner. She has him pegged, and in turn, he is able to see himself without the adornment of the literary affectation he hides behind.
The literary project of discovering oneself through interactions with the important women in one’s life is a long-running tradition, but in today’s woke culture, a novel such as The Women I Love places a writer in a dangerous position, which is why Pacifico meticulously takes aim not only at Marcello but also at the other men who figure prominently in the novel. There’s Marcello’s writer buddy and confidante, who, in another autofictional touch, shares the author’s name. This Francesco, like Marcello, is heading into middle age and feels like a failure because he’s “forty years old and has nothing to show for it.” Francesco is a passive bourgeoise sentimentalist whose main interest is living the literary life. The friends are perpetually unfulfilled by their lifestyle choices, but their passivity and the male malaise that perpetuates it prevent them from truly acting. Marcello’s father, a successful entrepreneur and dutiful provider, is an emotional vacuum, going passive, and often disappearing, when dealing with familial troubles.
In order to blunt some of the criticisms of misogyny that will surely be levied his way, Pacifico made sure that his male characters are as unlikeable and as unredeemable as possible. The repugnant passivity of the male characters is a striking contrast to the volatility of the female characters, but the novel makes clear that it is the men, and not the women, who are to blame for their problems. The readers who seek out this type of literary novel are highly in tune to the problems of misogyny and look for it even when it’s not there, so it won’t be a surprise if all they see is the stream of female body parts lovingly described and miss that this is a novel, first and foremost, about male inadequacy.
The Women I Love is that rare contemporary novel that dissects both men and women with brutal honesty, which is why Pacifico is one of the most interesting writers working today. He’s at his best for long stretches in The Women I Love, but even when he misses the mark, he’s still provocative and always entertaining.
Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. Follow him on Twitter: @Perez_Writes.
