Unravelling mysteries
Maxine Alterio’s new novel, The Gulf Between, opens with sirens wailing and a long-lost now-adult son arriving in an ambulance while his mother, who has not clapped eyes on him for more than 30 years, drops everything to be by his side.
Whether he will know who his mother is if and when he regains consciousness is the harrowing question Julia — the book’s narrator — asks herself. She wonders if he will recognise her, and she wonders how he’s ended up where she lives now, in Queenstown, New Zealand. The last time Julia saw her son was in Italy.
And so begins a wrenching, emotional, tension-filled story about family secrets, cultural expectations and hidden corruptions. The novel’s plot spans decades, though much of the action has been elided and is condensed into an urgent, vivid 19 months in Napoli in 1961 and 1962. After the initial scene of Julia rushing to a Queenstown hospital in 1994, we turn back to England in 1949 as a young Julia, against her parents’ wishes, meets and marries Ben, an Italian living in London. When their children are 10 and almost 8, Ben and Julia leave England and move to Napoli to live with Ben’s ailing mother and his brother.
But before Ben and Julia had married, Julia’s parents had let her know in no uncertain terms
that they were dead-set against all Italians. Their antipathy toward Italians is prescient, in fact.
As the plot unfolds, we learn of much that is distasteful and alarming and, tellingly, shrouded in guilt and resentment in Ben’s family’s past and present. As we read of Julia’s parents’ biases, we at first feel that they are acting out of line, that their assumptions about Ben and his compatriots are unjustified. Yet as the book digs in deeper to its story, we learn that, in fact, all Julia’s parents’ worst fears—and even ones that they may not have been able to articulate— have come to pass.
Living in Napoli for those few months has indelibly changed Julia. As she says of herself after living in Italy, “There were occasions when I doubted whether he, or anyone else, including me, ever revealed who we really were to others, even when undergoing psychoanalysis. I was learning to accept that everyone, not just Napoletani, wore masks, play-acted and changed allegiances. The surefire certainty I’d had as a young woman shifted to uncertainty — a more realistic state, although rarely comfortable.”
How Julia winds up separated for decades from her son and how she ends up alone in New Zealand (a place where she is, as she tells us, “a better version” of herself) far from all those she loves and holds dear, are the mysteries that this compelling novel unravels for us.