Rome: Broken City

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories, there are no paparazzo. Tourists visit but mostly gawk at ruins and patronize overpriced restaurants that make suckers out of them. The residents live in rental apartments suffering from permanent decay or in moldy pseudo-palazzos an insane traffic-drive from the center of town. When they go on vacation, people battle mosquitoes, murky water, and marital ennui. There is no glamour, only uncertainty and the constant threat of dislocation and crime.

If this sounds fun to you, then we have different definitions of fun. Years ago, Lahiri, an accomplished, award-winning novelist, and short-story writer, declared Italy her home and declared Italian the language in which she would write from now on, a fascinating development. She is Indian, so English isn’t her “native” language, but it is a language she grew up speaking and it’s the language where she made her bones. So Roman Stories, while not Lahiri’s first English-language book in translation, is an interesting phenomenon in that it’s a translated book even though the writer could have done it in English if she’d so chosen. This extra step of linguistic distance just adds to the alienated, insider-outsider perspective of her sad but beautifully crafted short stories.

Though Lahiri features variegated nameless narrators, from youth to elderly, female and male, she still narrates all the Roman Stories in the first person. Every voice is her voice, conveying a general feeling of bumping around an impossible and overrated metropolis that’s dirty and falling apart. Despite the diversity, her narrators fall into three basic types: native Romans, middle-aged or older, dealing with grief, divorce, or other midlife crises; lonely expats, often academics or spouses of diplomats who don’t know exactly why they ended up in Italy; and, most significantly, dark-skinned immigrants who have to deal with appalling racism on a daily basis.

Lahiri herself is quite privileged, so getting inside the heads of her more downtrodden characters is her most impressive and sympathetically imaginative feat in Roman Stories. She never mentions specific countries from where the immigrants arrive. They only mention that their homelands are hot, or that they grew up among palm trees. You can assume India, but it could also be Sri Lanka, or, in the cases of a couple of specific characters, North or West Africa.

One poor dark-skinned man finally moves his large family into a small apartment in a bad neighborhood near a modern hospital, a moment that he treats like he’d just won the lottery. But this “Italian dream”  goes south quickly as the threatening glares of neighbors turns into threatening graffiti on the front door, insults hurled at the kids, and an apartment break-in. Finally it gets so bad that he has to put his family on a plane back to the homeland, and ends up sleeping under a highway where at least people won’t bother him.

In another story, a presumptively Indian housekeeper for a pashmina-flinging widow who goes on glamorous vacations to Goa visits the post office to look for a lost package. On her way back, a couple of Vespa-riding hooligans shoot her with a bb gun, crippling her for life, just because she was trying to be of service. There are multiple incidents like this in Roman Stories. Whether Lahiri’s brown-skinned characters are servants or professors on holiday, they have to deal with nativist nonsense from ignorantly bigoted losers who really should just leave them alone. Those pieces are the emotional heart of the book and they make Lahiri’s other well-crafted tales of professorial and professional misgiving seem very First World-problem by comparison.

The centerpiece of the book is a multi-part story called The Steps, recounting the lives of different people who live along, or visit, one of the many stone staircases embossed into the Roman cityscape. These steps (not The Spanish Steps), have seen better days. They are a mess of chipped concrete and broken glass and cigarette butts from partying teenagers. Over the course of book, a teenage Indian girl recalls the time her “uncle” molested her, widows deal with regret, teenagers rob someone, and a couple of middle-aged American brothers visit, recalling the time they lived near the steps and found out their dad was gay and was leaving their mother. It is not a cavalcade of gelato and fun.

Lahiri writes classically-constructed, intimate stories reminiscent of other New Yorker-style masters like Alice Munro. Her stories are musing, low-key, intimate, and deeply human. But while she might win some prizes, I don’t think the city leaders are going to be selling Roman Stories at tourist destination gift shops. Rome needs people to return to the broken city, but the characters in Roman Stories would mostly rather be somewhere else.

(Knopf, October 10, 2023)