THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 89
and his classmates in the practices of
“unmasking” bourgeois society: “revers-
ing appearances, overturning fixed hier-
archies, overturning the money chang-
ers’ tables.” At the same time, they taught
the boys how to thrive in a bourgeois so-
ciety. Thus Catholic school raised them
to be inwardly divided, set against them-
selves—at once desiring and despising
worldly things. It taught them, Albinati
writes, “to be masochists... to redeem
our pain and sorrow by discovering in
the end that they are pleasurable, to love
the wounds of Jesus as if they had been
inflicted on our own bodies.”
That is nothing new. Thinkers from
Nietzsche onward have found fault with
Christianity for exalting submission.
What is new is the twist Albinati gives
to the legacy of his schooling. As a boy,
he says, he had masochism forced on
him through the catechism; as a man,
he finds that his education lingers, lead-
ing him to view its reciprocal, sadism,
as the dark heart of society.
Rape, in this schema, is not “some-
thing exceptional or pathological” but a
symptom of the way things are. Albinati
discusses rape philosophically, the way
another writer might discuss the role of
friendship or physical labor in society:
“Rape is the simplified paradigm of re-
lations between the sexes, its energy-sav-
ing mode, its substantial diagram, and it
lies at the foundation of every relation-
ship, of every act of intercourse, not nec-
essarily brutal ones.” Rape is a quintes-
sential case of the gratuitous, in that it
separates the male sexual impulse from
every kind of necessity. This may be why
Albinati the Catholic-school alumnus is
fascinated by it: because rape is a brutal
rejection of the traditional Catholic teach-
ing that sexual intercourse is meant for
the purpose of procreation in marriage
and that all other sex is immoral—gra-
tuitous. Or it may be that he is fascinated
because rape, in the terms of the novel,
is an unmistakable way for a man to over-
come the masochistic habit of self-sub-
jugation he acquired at school by sadis-
tically asserting himself. He declares that
the effect of rape is different from that
of intercourse per se, for it is connected
“with the subjugation of someone else’s
will to your own... when we are capa-
ble of obligating others to do, not what
they want to do, but what we want them
to do.” He observes, “I can’t be certain
that my witticism will make a girl laugh,
or that my gaze will fascinate her, but for
sure, a slap or a punch will make her cry.”
It’s enough to make you wonder whether
you missed something—whether the
author-narrator took part in the crime
on Monte Circeo, and this book is meant
to be the diary of a rapist.
Readers sometimes object to “gratu-
itous sex” or “gratuitous violence,” on the
ground that the graphic depiction of these
things can reduce complex relationships
to carnal fundamentals. Often, that is the
effect of the passages about sex in this
novel, as Albinati forces the experience
of a generation of men through the nee-
dle’s eye of his “sadomaso” interpretation.
Some of Albinati’s accounts of his own
sexual exploits seem so purely gratuitous,
in this banal sense, that they undermine
the more robust idea of the gratuitous
on which his very long novel depends.
All that material is far from Catholic
school, and that is the point of it. Henry
James, writing, in 1879, about Nathaniel
Hawthorne, spelled out some of the pos-
sibilities available to an American over-
shadowed by the “darkening cloud” of
original sin that came with the Puritan
heritage. Such a person could contrive to
live comfortably beneath it, could suffer
under it, could try to cast it off, or could
“transmute” it into art, as James felt that
Hawthorne had done. It may be that the
best way to understand “The Catholic
School” is as a middle-aged Italian man’s
effort to cast off his Catholic upbringing
at last. Fifty years after Albinati left Cath-
olic school in Rome, the combination of
countercultural religion and bourgeois
morality impressed on him there still
overshadows his life more than he likes.
This novel is his effort to free himself
from it—“to get rid of it, not to remem-
ber it,” he said after “The Catholic School”
won the Strega Prize.
The novel’s unbounded intelligence,
its cool take on sexual violence, and its
disregard for conventions of character
and plot are assertions of the author’s
independence from Catholic and bour-
geois expectations. So is its extreme
length. At the same time, the length
suggests how hard it can be for such a
man to shed such an upbringing, even
in supposedly secular contemporary Italy.
He can’t just get rid of it once and for
all; he has to assert his freedom from it
again and again.SHOWCASE
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