On shaky ground
I read most of Chiara Barzini’s debut novel like a squeamish person squinting at the screen during a horror movie, willing the ingénue not to open that door. “Things That Happened Before the Earthquake” opens in the summer of 1992, when the protagonist and narrator Eugenia, her brother and parents move from Rome to Los Angeles in pursuit of her father’s celluloid dreams. In each of the book’s three parts, a savage act of extreme violence snaps like lightning, getting progressively closer to Eugenia, with the Northridge earthquake the final strike to both the book and the city.
Each part is distinctly bound by time and geography. Part one, “Departure,” tracks Eugenia and her family’s first year in Hollywood’s stepsister, the San Fernando Valley. Her filmmaking parents are too wrapped up in their vision of themselves as laid-back creatives to do more than keep their children generally alive. Sent to a ritzy high school, Eugenia is uncool, intellectual bait. Her only survival skills are a blasé attitude toward hookups and a radar for people with pot. She has terrible, pointless sex with strangers, high school boys and one completely bonkers screenwriter.
After a particularly reckless night early in the book, Eugenia puts on a psychological “rubber suit” to insulate herself from the alien Americans she walks among. And she does walk, trekking past the valley’s strip malls and car washes. On Sepulveda Boulevard, she stumbles across her saving grace, a vintage store full of Hollywood relics run by a one-eared man named Henry. She discovers a joy in rescuing beautiful things from American negligence of the past, and a real friendship.
Eugenia and her brother are sent back to Italy for the summer, spending part two, “Return,” at their uncle’s house in the Aeolian Islands off Sicily. Despite the relief from urban turbulence, the return home is not the respite that Eugenia hopes for: her well-intentioned meddling ramps up tensions on the desiccated island into an explosion of displaced fury, the novel’s second.
I often find myself asking when reading books in which young, sensitive, creative women have a lot of very unpleasant sex, What is the point? From Eimear McBride to Lena Dunham, the trend in women’s coming-of-age stories seems to be recording the degradations of sex and its hurtful, transactional nature. Isn’t the entire point of nostrings attached sex to be pure momentary pleasure? Why bother, otherwise?
We get hints toward Barzini’s answer for Eugenia in part three, “Arrival.” Eugenia finally connects with a glimmering girl she’d admired the year before, who “had a look that said goodbye at the exact moment it was saying hello.” Deva lives in a cabin in Topanga Canyon, which becomes Eugenia’s refuge from the valley, a place, Eugenia thinks, “where I could get in touch with something primal.” Eugenia is entranced by the soured remnants of artists’ communes lingering in the hushed oasis of the canyon. She and Deva insulate themselves in the forested folds, awash in Vicodin and pot while Deva’s musician father drinks himself into rage.
Barzini’s Los Angeles allures in its mash-up of shabby hustlers, teeming pavement and untrustworthy nature. Claire Vaye Watkins’ speculative fiction of Southern California, “Gold Fame Citrus,” could be a half-sister, and the 1990s cult classic movie “Swingers” also came to mind, with its strivers too full of Old Hollywood visions to believe the dilapidated present.
For all the smoggy accuracy of the novel’s atmosphere, the characters remain flimsy; beautiful, fragile Deva comes across as just another manic pixie dream girl. Ettore and Serena, Eugenia’s parents, are foolish caricatures — perhaps reflecting how all teenagers see their parents. Even the narrator herself is more cypher than consciousness, receding into writerly observation. But even if the novel feels like it’s on a set, its hollowness somehow still rings true.
Most of the time, even realist novels offer readers an escape from their own reality. Although its denouement leans toward resolution and catharsis, Barzini’s book will not comfort you, especially if you were a high school girl in California in the 1990s. It surfaced memories for me of all the girls I knew who tested danger like a knife’s edge against their thumb. Girls who were handed Vicodin and vodka by parents at parties before the prom, who got drunk with boys they trusted but definitely shouldn’t have, who drove long nights searching for somewhere that wasn’t here. This book, for me, is the antithesis of nostalgia — it is rather the surfacing of risk and dread.
The Germans have a tidy word for these stories of artists coming of age: künstlerroman. From the very first page, Barzini probes smeared boundary lines, testing their power to lash back as Eugenia transgresses. The earthquake looms, and though we know that we always rebuild, there’s unavoidable wreckage: Surviving is always a chance, never certainty.