88 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
on adolescence. He opens with the story
of his friend Arbus: pale, frail, skinny,
and so bright that he is given “abstruse
nicknames” such as the “unmoved
mover.” And Albinati intimates that the
main concern of the novel will be a crime
committed by some classmates of his
in September, 1975: a rape and murder
that became headline news in Italy the
way that the Central Park rape case did
in New York in the next decade.
A time, a place, an upbringing, a friend-
ship, all shot through with violence: these
elements recall Elena Ferrante’s four Ne-
apolitan novels. Similarly, the promise of
an unpacking of the sacred and profane
mysteries of postmodern manhood calls
to mind Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My
Struggle” series (whose sixth volume runs
to eleven hundred and sixty pages). You
may find yourself anticipating a work that
does for Rome in the seventies what Fer-
rante has done for postwar Naples, and
for male friendship what Knausgaard did
for fathers and sons. But the anticipation
is premature, the comparisons misplaced.
The brilliant friend Arbus soon drops
out of the text. So do the devices that
novelists as different as Ferrante and
Knausgaard rely on: characters, dialogue,
incident, chronology, and, especially, the
rendering of everyday life through pre-
cise, detail-flecked paraphrase.
For a few hundred pages, nothing
much happens. The most dramatic in-
cident Albinati relates from his school
days involves some bullies whipping a
weaker boy, as in a rite of flagellation.
The rape and murder is treated in a dozen
unspectacular pages. Two young men
who went to school with Albinati ab-
duct two young women after a double
date and take them to a vacation house
on Monte Circeo, between Rome and
Naples; joined by a third young man,
they rape the women, kill one of them,
wrap them both in plastic, and stuff them
in the trunk of a car; then they drive to
Rome and park the car overnight in the
Quartiere Trieste, where the surviving
woman, kicking and screaming in the
trunk, is heard by a neighbor.
That crime is the novel’s link to the
conceit of the gratuitous. In fiction, the
gratuitous descends from André Gide’s
1914 novel, “Les Caves du Vatican,” in
which the callow young Frenchman
Lafcadio, on a train between Rome and
Naples, spots a man he knows slightly
and pushes him off the moving train.
For Gide and his modernist disciples,
the “unmotivated crime,” the gratuitous
act, was a challenge to both the Euro-
pean civilization of the Enlightenment
and the older Christian civilization, which
in their different ways maintained that
human behavior is shaped by reason,
motive, and purpose. The term “the gra-
tuitous” appropriated Christian claims
about God’s grace, freedom, and inscru-
tability, applying them to human actions
in a godless world.
A century later, Albinati has fiction-
alized the crime his classmates commit-
ted and elaborated on it in the language
of broad-brush cultural criticism. He
calls it “the kind of scandal that disfigures
in an indelible fashion the space that it
lays open to the glare of daylight,” and
goes on to cycle through rhetorical
effects in an effort to register its signifi-
cance. The crime, he writes,served at the same time as a warning against
the evil detected, but also implicitly instigated
others to commit the same crime by the force
of a negative example, suggesting that by now
the world was contaminated and there could
be no respite from corruption and violence.
Either you were victims or you were perpetra-
tors (the slogan “We are all responsible,” which
dates back to distant Catholic roots, has had
an incredible popularity in our country, and
caused the damages I’ve already discussed: by
summoning us all to accept glaring or hidden
guilt, at the same time it dilutes that guilt in
a sort of generic collective sin, which can be
condoned equally collectively), or else both
things together, perpetrators and victims, which
leads to a sort of general amnesty. Stigmatized
in words, the horror became accessible, within
reach of one and all....
Innocence was ruined for good. If inno-
cence had ever existed.That reflection comes three hundred
pages after the account of the crime. In
the interim, Albinati the author-narra-
tor holds forth on many topics. He pon-
ders “the morality of sacrifice,” the na-
ture of resentment, and the character of
the bourgeoisie (such as their tendency
“to minimize,” as when his parents would
say, “It’s nothing.... Let’s drop it. Let’s
just forget about it”). He sees the rape
and murder on Monte Circeo as “gra-
tuitous” because it was a crime that he
feels any of his classmates could have
committed—essentially date rape taken
to a terrible extreme—and one in which
they are, in a sense, collectively com-
plicit. More broadly, he regards this no-tion of the gratuitous as a key that un-
locks the mysteries of contemporary life.
For him, as for Surrealists like André
Breton, it is an action whose express
purpose is to have no purpose. It is often
characterized by excess, as in acts of
cruelty and torture. Free of “necessity,”
it represents “nonconformism” and “aban-
donment.” The terrorist violence of neo-
Fascists in Italy in the nineteen-seventies,
for example, was gratuitous, in that it
did away with “any need to answer for
its deeds” and kept them “uncontami-
nated by the leprosy of reason.”
As these notions are developed over
many pages, it becomes clear that “The
Catholic School” is not a social novel
about well-born Roman Catholics, and
not a work of true crime. It is a very late
entry in the long European tradition of
the novel as a quasi-philosophical essay
in disguise. Here and there, Albinati
presses the essayish impulse into differ-
ent forms: a long sermon by a priest of
the school; Arbus’s class notes on Ma-
chiavelli’s “The Prince”; a series of pensées
supposedly found in a notebook left by
a beloved teacher. Mostly, though, he
writes as Edoardo Albinati, an author in
middle age who is struggling to finish a
book. Weary of fiction, he expounds on
whatever is on his mind, and the very
long novel becomes a succession of slant-
wise essays about gender, sex, and power.
He paraphrases thinkers from Freud to
Judith Butler; he flirts with autofiction,
making a record of his reflections through
several Easters, as the parish priest, fol-
lowing Italian custom, shows up to bless
his apartment (divorced, Albinati is back
in the old neighborhood) and engages
with him on the question of whether
and what he believes.W
hy is the novel called “The Cath-
olic School”? The title, like so
much else in the book, seems arbitrary.
Albinati was never a fervent believer, and
he stopped going to Mass in his early
teens. All the same, Catholicism is a sub-
ject he cherishes. For him, as for many
fallen-away Catholics, the further he gets
from his Catholic upbringing, the more
he has to say about it. “To have studied
at a school run by priests was an origi-
nal sin that would have to be scrubbed
out,” he reflects early on. In his own life,
he sees the influence of his education in
a double way. The priests schooled him