July 17, 2017
Pacifico’s (The Story of My Purity) ultimately tiresome examination of cultural rot calls to mind La Dolce Vita reworked by Bret Easton Ellis. The novel centers on a group of Italians, most of whom are parentally subsidized, pursuing their sentimental educations between New York City and Italy. They are a feckless class, able to express themselves only through consumption. These fortunates include a young viral marketer, Ludovica, and her husband, Lorenzo, a cineast. In their orbit is Nico Berengo, an occasional journalist who “spends most of his time introducing people to one another” and whose Manhattan apartment is the gathering place for the Italian community. These expats are predominantly “velleitari—the aspirants who dabble in the arts with little talent of stamina or awareness,” and Pacifico mercilessly ironizes them all. Empathy towards his characters is nonexistent (“The personal fulfillment of the bourgeois isn’t worth the carbon footprint required to sustain it.”), and the book is a reaction against moralizing novels—specifically American—that “provide a model of absolute virtue.” Contempt can be enlivening, but here it’s generally enervating, a skewering of pretentiousness that is itself pretentious. Pacifico liberally sprinkles brand names throughout, and readers must endure mind-numbing descriptions of bodily entanglements accompanied by dialogue like, “You’re mine. I’ll choke you, and I’ll drown you. I’m Niagara Falls.” The book peters out into an appendix of fragments.