What if each unhappy family is, in practice, unhappy in fundamentally the same way? Can you reduce all familial unhappiness to a simple formula of cruelty, alienation, and poor boundaries?
Andrea Bajani presents us with one very unhappy family in The Anniversary, refusing to even name his characters, as the now-adult son of the family marks ten years since he last spoke to either of his parents. He retells their story and his in sparse but significant terms, painting the picture of a marriage marked by power, control, terror, and maybe even violence, but in a voice that allows the narrator to examine his own feelings through two lenses, how he felt at the time and how he feels now with the benefit of time and distance.
The narrator’s father is the obvious villain in the story, as he is cut from similar cloth to David Melrose in Edward St. Aubyn’s Melrose novels and Sam Pollit in Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, terrorizing first his wife and then his entire family with his outbursts, his vicious tongue, and later his delusions, like believing he’s capable of giving his enemies cancer through his mental powers. The narrator begins with his parents meeting, telling how his mother was actually the more educated one, heading to university when her husband-to-be dropped out of high school, dreaming of a job as a teacher while he had to take a sales job because it was all that was available to him. He compensated for this power imbalance by taking her down through his words, eventually pressuring her into abandoning her studies and her hopes of a career so she could be first his servile housewife and later a stay-at-home mother to the two children they would have in quick succession after marrying. The husband set a perimeter around his wife and tightened it slowly over time, limiting her contact with her own parents, then her friends, and eventually isolating her almost completely in their apartment until the children were nearly grown.
The narrator was a witness to much of this behavior, but did little to stop it or push back until he was much older, and even in early adulthood remained obsequious to his domineering father and cipher mother, still largely obeying his father’s wishes or orders well into his 30s. His slightly older sister, from whom he is also estranged, although less strictly so, couldn’t get out of that environment quickly enough; there’s much less on their relationship, but it is clear from the hints Bajani drops that it’s also quite complicated, with resentment in both directions, her willingness to protect him somewhat as a child turning into disdain for his obeisance to their father in adulthood.
Part of the spell that The Anniversary casts comes from Bajani’s use of small moments in conversation to stand in for the giant breakpoints you might expect given that the narrator tells us in the first chapter that he has cut ties with his parents. There is, in fact, one almost-certain story of physical abuse here, but it isn’t an impetus for anything – in fact, the perpetrator ends up forgiving the victim in a perversion of the normal order of things, further underscoring how skewed these internal relationships are. Every time there’s a large shift in any of those relationships, husband to wife, husband to son, or wife to son, it’s over something modest, maybe a sentence spoken, sometimes something not spoken. The final conversation between son and parents, after which the narrator decides to change his phone number (we’re in the pre-cellular era), feels so small, hinging on one thing his father says, but it sits on a mountain of decades of lived experience.
The Anniversary won the Strega Prize, Italy’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – winners include The Leopard, The Name of the Rose, and The Solitude of Prime Numbers – this year, and comes out in English tomorrow. (I received a review copy from the publisher.) Like many other recent winners, it’s quite short, only 135 pages, and punches well above its weight thanks to its economy of prose. Bajani has crafted a scenario that feels specific yet applicable to so many families, real or constructed, where power imbalances or insufficient boundaries fester over time, and nobody makes a real move to change them because so many people are just conditioned to accept family, whatever it may look like.
I was probably predisposed to like the novel anyway, given my affinity for Italian literature, but The Anniversary is superb. It’s incisive, thoughtful, and, despite its bleak subject, gripping right to the end.
Next up: Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent, one of the nominees for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.