In the frenzied speculation over the identity of the pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante, Domenico Starnone has often been treated as a primary suspect. One of Italy’s most respected living writers, Starnone, like Ferrante, writes literary fiction that confronts the brutality of growing up in working-class Naples, the turbulence of postwar politics in Italy, and the psychological violence between bourgeois men and women. Italian literary detectives, apparently unfazed by the sexist implications of ascribing Ferrante’s brilliant écriture féminine to a masculine pen, have dogged Starnone’s footsteps for years, poring over thematic and stylistic similarities between Ferrante’s work and his. Last fall, when the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti used financial records, intrusively, to unmask Starnone’s wife as the “real” Ferrante, Gatti made a point of suggesting “the possibility of some kind of unofficial collaboration with her husband.”
Starnone has vociferously denied any such connection. When his latest book, “Ties,” was published in Italy, in 2014, a journalist for La Repubblica observed that the novel—which is out in English this month, from Europa Editions, in a crisp translation by Jhumpa Lahiri—bears a striking resemblance to Ferrante’s novel “The Days of Abandonment,” from 2002. Both books explore the painful fallout of a husband’s infidelity, but Starnone pointed out that the abandoned-wife archetype dates back much further than Ferrante, whose own work plays on predecessors from Greek myths to Tolstoy. “Why don’t we talk about the link between Starnone and Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’?” he demanded. “My radical position on marriage is the result of ‘The Kreutzer Sonata.’ I have not thought of Ferrante. Put yourself in my shoes. I have a project in mind. Since the world believes that I am Ferrante, I have to throw it away?”
Yet, in the same interview, Starnone coyly pointed out that both “Ties” and “Days of Abandonment” contain the precise detail of a glass vessel, which each wife breaks in response to her husband’s faithlessness. This is but one of many conspicuous correspondences and mirror images between the two novels. Both center upon a couple with two children, a son and a daughter, and a husband who leaves his wife for a much younger woman. Both feature a break-in, an older neighbor, an unsettling incident involving the family pet, and a wife who processes her abandonment by furiously writing letters. More strikingly, both allude to the pain of a damaged marriage using the metaphor of wire cutting flesh. But where Ferrante’s novel dwells in the immediate aftershock of marital betrayal, and the psychic fury it unleashes, Starnone expands the scope of his story, exploring the quieter but more protracted violence of joining a ruptured union back together. Which is all to say that, regardless of whether Starnone is the husband of Elena Ferrante, “Ties” is one half of a collaboration far more intriguing than co-authorship of individual books: a riveting dialogue on marriage conducted, on the page, between one novelist and another.
“Ties” unfolds in three parts, beginning with the letters that the wife, Vanda, writes to her husband, Aldo, after his departure. Ferrante never shows us the letters that her heroine, Olga, composes in the throes of her frenzied grief; in “Ties,” Vanda’s precise, coldly furious letters are the only expression of her suffering that we see. We learn in reading them that her husband’s affair, with a nineteen-year-old student, was inspired—or perhaps, in his mind, justified—by newly fashionable ideas about the false constraints of bourgeois family life. They’d married young; now marrying young is a sign of being “behind the times.” Vanda recalls Aldo’s “pedantic calm” as he pontificates on “the roles we were imprisoned in by getting married.” At first, the break in their marriage seems temporary, a momentary rebellion, and she tries to persuade him to return. But subsequent letters reveal that Aldo has stayed away for years, leaving her to make ends meet, and that—shockingly—he neither called nor visited after she attempted suicide. In the final letter, composed four years after the first, she reluctantly honors his request to meet with their children again: “They’re crushed by uncertainty and fear,” she warns. “Don’t make it worse for them.”
Where “The Days of Abandonment” presents a picture, as James Wood put it in a 2013 New Yorker review, of “a mind in emergency, at the very limits of coherence and decency,” “Ties” is puzzle-like, architectural, a novel ingeniously constructed to conceal family secrets and then excavate them one by one. In its second section, the story takes a disorienting leap ahead in time to find the couple living together again, in an apartment in Rome, four decades after the initial rupture. With their children grown and out of the house, husband and wife coexist in a strained marital peace. He is cautious and feeble; she is wary and sharp, able to level him with a stare. Aldo, our narrator, lives in terror of an explosion, “of losing control of the entire delicate system of weights and counterweights that had kept my life in check for five decades,” a fear which is realized when the couple arrives home from a beach vacation to discover that their apartment has been viciously ransacked. It is a perplexing crime: No valuables have been stolen—only their cat, Labes, is missing—but their orderly possessions have been painstakingly trashed and broken. As he picks through the wreckage in his study, Aldo finds his wife’s old letters, tucked away and forgotten, and relives in his mind the end of their separation—when he tentatively rejoined the familial circle only after his young lover, Lidia, outgrew him and abandoned him in turn. The burglary is a reminder that their home is laced with poisonous memories of his betrayal, concealed in drawers and on hard-to-reach shelves—a metal cube containing old Polaroids, a yellowed envelope of letters. Indeed, the entire contents of the couple’s home—and even the name of their cat—come to seem like a vessel for their buried despair. “Ties” is a portrait of marriage as an empty shell, a home for nothing other than mutual self-deception. As Vanda puts it, “Love is just a container we shove everything into.”
What light does this miserable reconciliation shed on the experience of Olga, who suffers so ferociously in “The Days of Abandonment”? If “Days” explores how a woman can be subsumed into her marriage—leaving a howling vacuum behind when the vessel is broken—then “Ties” surveys, in part, the violence of masculine entitlement, as Aldo dismantles a marriage, and a life, and just as selfishly puts it back together again. Olga’s suffering demands sympathy, whereas Aldo’s craven infidelity elicits none. But “Ties” not only examines the male mentality that allows his abandonment to occur; it also lays bare the complicity between husband and wife in perpetuating the lie of their marriage. The final section of Starnone’s novel is narrated by Aldo and Vanda’s daughter, Anna, who is aware that her parents’ pact of denial has had ruinous consequences. “The only ties that counted for our parents were the ones they’ve tortured each other with their whole lives,” she tells her brother, after meeting him at their parents’ home. Her father’s truly unforgivable act, she points out, was not the abandonment but the return: “Once you’ve taken action to hurt people profoundly, to kill or, in any case, permanently devastate other human beings, you can’t go back. You have to accept the responsibility for the crime through and through. You can’t commit a half-crime.”
Starnone’s invocation of marital crime and killing does indeed bring to mind Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” the 1889 novella whose protagonist, Pozdnyshev, tells the story of how he came to murder his wife, and makes a case that marriage is a sham, a crime against mankind. There are shades of Pozdnyshev in Aldo’s self-serving notions of “fighting against institutions and suffocating habits,” and “Ties” certainly depicts marriage as, in Pozdnyshev’s words, a “terrible hell.” But, if Aldo is a Pozdnyshev, Starnone is certainly not, and his reference to “Kreutzer Sonata” in the La Repubblica interview, ostensibly meant to dismiss the connection to Ferrante, only ties the knot more securely. Pozdnyshev’s fictional rants articulated many of Tolstoy’s own views on sex and family life, and Tolstoy’s wife, Sofiya, always resented the book as an attack on their marriage. In the early eighteen-nineties, she wrote her own literary response to his book, a pair of novellas that correspond to “Kreutzer” with the same precision as Starnone’s novel does to Ferrante’s. (The novellas were published in English, in 2014, as part of “The Kreutzer Sonata Variations.”)
At the end of the same interview, Starnone said, “Can I confess a secret? Between me and Ferrante there is an abyss.” These words echo a line from the “Kreutzer Sonata,” when Pozdnyshev describes his first quarrel with his wife as “the sudden discovery of the abyss that had been dug between us.” Was Starnone referring, as he implied, to a chasm of subject matter and style between Ferrante’s work and his? Or did he borrow Tolstoy’s words as a way of “confessing,” instead, to the chasm that both he and Ferrante have jointly explored so brilliantly in their fiction—the one that can exist only between husband and wife? Ferrante, of course, might remind us that the distinction is irrelevant. “Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow,” she has said, “if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.”