Faber & Faber • 320 pp. • $16
This review has been drawn from the August issue of the American Reader, available here.
It’s hard to tell a grown-up story about kids. The major themes that motivate adult drama—love, sex, death—come to children through rumor and whisper, through glimpses into a world hiding itself away. At least since Freud we’ve accepted that children have relationships with sex and violence, but a novel’s reader is always going to comprehend things about what’s happening to child protagonists that the characters haven’t yet learned the words to describe. At it’s best, authors use this disjuncture as a device that forces readers to see adult social phenomena in a still forming language, a jagged and heterodox tongue that hasn’t yet been evened out by experience. But what’s unfortunately more common is the use of flat precocious archetypes, of kids who are already more adult than the adults around them. Giorgio Vasta’s first novel Time on My Hands falls squarely in the latter category.
Originally published in Italy in 2008 and now translated into English, Time on My Hands is the story of Palermo, Italy over the course of the year 1978 as experienced by an eleven year old. Or at least what the author claims is an eleven year old. The novel wouldn’t strain the reader’s suspension of disbelief quite as much if the narrator were just a few years older—a short Publishers Weekly review even made the mistake of calling it a “portrait of teenage rebellion.” Whether Vasta is trying to be provocative or make a point about adolescence, in refusing to deal with children on their own terms he fails at both.
Inspired by the sexy violence of the militant left Red Brigades, our narrator forms his own cell with two classmates. He takes the name Nimbus, while his comrades become Radius and Flight. Together they plot escalating acts of terror, from property destruction to kidnapping. Fifth graders playing cops and insurrectionaries is hardly unrealistic, but Vasta’s characters combine Damian-like pure evil with the rhetorically sophisticated messianic nihilism of a grad student communique committee. Flight describes their strategy in the following terms: “We need to become unrecognizable so we can exploit this mundane epidemic to satisfy our desire for an absolute epidemic. After all, it’s not only us that feel this desire, but the whole of Italian society.” These kids aren’t just precocious, they’re non-mimetic, inhuman narrative constructions; they’re not subjects but shards of social pathology undigested through a consciousness.
When first we meet Nimbus, he’s with his mother feeding sick, stray, and generally abject neighborhood cats. Everything is dirty and diseased in the streets of 1978 Palermo, and Nimbus wants to be part of it. When his mother—Nimbus calls his mother, father, and little brother String, Stone, and Cotton in a way that feels affected and unnecessary—turns her back, he pulls out a short length of barbed wire and presses it into the flesh of a cat too far gone to resist. Torturing small animals is textbook child psychopath behavior, and like too many of Vasta’s anecdotes it feel diagnostic. It feels as if the reader is watching the story through a school-mandated therapist’s eyes. There are framing devices that justify this kind of focus on childhood stories and their developmental significance—as in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, told from a psychologist’s couch—but Time on My Hands doesn’t create any distance between its protagonist’s actions and the narrator’s voice.
Nimbus, Radius, and Flight aren’t interested in the ideology of the Red Brigades, but in their aesthetic. They take the brutal surface of vanguard militancy and elevate it into an ethos, but Time on My Hands is not a novel about radical politics. The comrades progress orderly through the standard stages of adolescent psychopathology: animal torturing, shoplifting, graffiti, arson, classmate torturing, and finally murder. Vasta tries to tie their dark spiral to the political climate in late 70s Italy—specifically the kidnapping and assassination of Christian Democrat parliamentary leader Aldo Moro—but that doesn’t add any depth to his shallow characters. The three boys are more or less the same, speaking in a single decidedly unchildlike voice. Their group dynamic is a simple three-place hierarchy ordered by recklessness in the exercise of power. Nimbus begins the novel vying with Flight, but drops back as the situation gets more intense. It would be possible to say Nimbus faces a conflict between values, to sketch him into the familiar role of idealist betrayed by the revolution, but he doesn’t seem to have any values beyond a distaste for what he sees as society’s degenerate irony.
The boys discuss their strategy and the state of Italian society frequently, but in terms that suspend the suspension of disbelief. Vasta can’t possibly imagine readers will take it at face value when an 11 year old says “The enjoyment of fear is still there; it flows like an underground stream, although people tend to become inured to it. Our civilized instincts are desensitized” or “In Italy everything is reduced to the level of posturing, appearance, fashion. The sordid charade of fashion.” It isn’t simply a case of them repeating overheard rhetoric to impress schoolmates, Nimbus thinks in grandiose figurative language with the sentence structure and vocabulary of a poetry professor; a salt-monger’s call is a “hypnotic hendecasyllable, a commercial and religious incantation,” light coming through a tree turns to “shimmering hexagonal shards on the grass.” There isn’t a child who speaks as a child in the novel, Cotton and the two classmates they end up kidnapping are various kinds of mute.
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Exceptionally precocious child characters allow authors to act out a parent’s fantasy: kids who don’t have to be told to “think about what you’ve done.” Whether good or evil—exceptionally precocious child characters are usually good or evil—they allow authors to critique adult society from an assumed outside position. Even if the kids are murderers, their crimes are more obviously society’s crimes, their deviance a social deviance. When contradictions drive precocious child characters crazy, it’s not because they don’t understand but because they haven’t developed the adult hypocrisy that will protect them. As shrugging kids everywhere can attest, it’s hard to convey their motivations in the terms grown-ups use. Novelists like Vasta, Don DeLillo (Ratner’s Star), or David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) prefer to start with kids who already know too much for their own good. It’s the literary equivalent the O.C.’s using actors in their mid-20s to play high schoolers.
There’s nothing unconventional about portraying children as evil. As psychoanalyst Elisabeth Youmg-Bruehl writes in her book Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, “The insight with us since the Greek tragedians, that people do unto their children a version of what they feel has been done unto them, is very frightening… That children can grow up to do unto others (or sometimes unto themselves) what they have experienced makes the future frightening.” The Law and Order franchises have made millions by portraying child psychopaths, as have horror film producers. The moral of the story is always violence begets violence, children are our future, you reap what you sow, etc.
But when children are used like a societal mirror, it not only deprives them of agency as people, it neglects the movement of history. Children’s evil is generally portrayed as contentless and unproductive, either as an existential tendency to cruelty or a socially conditioned fascination with violence as such. This takes kids out of the real oppositions and antagonisms that structure their lives. More unrealistic in Time on My Hands than fifth graders talking like the situationists’ evil twins is when Nimbus mentions that they have no individual enemies, just the complacent whole of Italian society. As a site of social reproduction, children have to learn to perpetuate the particular inequalities, injustices, and hatreds that keep nations and economies going; letting the reader off the hook as Vasta does with evil children as the consequence of an evil society lacks the specificity of rigorous critique. Kids always have enemies.
When used artfully, children’s experiences are fertile ground for social criticism. We can learn a lot from kids, both because they have a developmental sensitivity to unfairness and hypocrisy and because they’re embryonic citizens in whose shape we can try to understand the systems that mold them. In Elfriede Jelinek’s Wonderful, Wonderful Times—it’s likewise about an evil gang of kids recklessly spreading havoc—the characters are vicious because they’re learning heterosexuality and gender roles. Tamara Faith-Berger’s Maidenhead draws sophisticated connections between a girl’s adolescence and the continuing legacies of colonialism, slavery, and domination. What’s truly terrifying isn’t how a child fails to fit into his or her social role, it’s the daily horrors that fitting in requires of them.
We use children as object-lessons in social criticism rather than creating space for them as critical subjects both in depiction and social life at our own peril. As Jon Savage detailed in Teenage, his history of 20th century youth culture, precocious, organized kids have been some of the earliest anti-fascist shock troops, even risking and sometimes losing their lives in the struggle. It’s the child who sees the emperor has no clothes because she hasn’t yet learned well enough not to. To benefit from this childish insight we have to see kids not as metaphorical people belonging to the present world in miniature, but as members of this society, party to the real conflicts that characterize it.
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