Books: Life Is a Steamroller

THE AGE OF MALAISE (203 pp.]—Docia Maraini—Grove ($3.95).

Adult amazement at the wayward bussing and bedding of today’s youth is worldwide. But it expresses itself differently in different regions. In the U.S., a land flowing with milk and sociology, it has induced oleaginous teenage columns. In Europe, where literature is still thought to have a lingering relevance to life, it has resulted in a whole writing genre, as often as not penned by the troubled and troubling young themselves.

France’s Françoise Sagan is the most famous example: at 18, she coolly chronicled how a girl grows up by driving her prospective stepmother to suicide (Bonjour Tristesse). In Le Rempart des Beguines, Belgium’s Franchise Mallet-Joris, at 20, documented a listless daughter’s love affair with her father’s mistress. The trend may have reached a climax with The Age of Malaise, a novel about a teenage girl in Rome written by Dacia Maraini, 25. Awarded the $10,000 Formentor publishers’ prize for some reason not decipherable in the book itself, the novel has now been released simultaneously by 13 publishers in 13 countries.

Everything happens to Enrica. The man she loves is a perennial student who had his way with her three years before, when she was only 14. He calls her to his room from time to time, but only to gobble her up like a biscuit Tortoni and turn back to his books. A love-struck lad from her typing class enjoys her in a muddy construction shack. A rich lawyer picks her up with his big car one night and performs titillating lathery rites with her in his fancy bathroom. Her mother dies of lung cancer. Her father, who spends his time designing unsalably ornate bird cages, loses their apartment, and Enrica has an abortion.

Is this a portrait of youthful existence in Italy? It seems unlikely. As a case history, the trials of Enrica are both too relentless and too bizarre to be convincing—even though they are recounted with a grimly detailed, laconic realism that echoes the style of her mentor, Novelist Alberto Moravia.

The single achievement of this slight book is the girl’s character. A victim who refuses to act like one, a survivor who survives because she does not try to justify life, a pitiable figure untainted by self-pity, Enrica has a kind of stoic charm. Not for export to the U.S., of course. The sociologists would ply her with group therapy. In a few weeks she would be blaming Dad for rejecting her, and tearfully reciting her laments to peer-group pals whose lives can be blighted by a back-seat rebuff on a blind date.