Vanity Fair Italy calls The Girl at the Door “the first post-Weinstein novel”, and therefore conjures with a stroke certain potent narratives about power and coercion, gender, objectification and sexual violence. The novel, which is about a rape accusation in a utopian community, certainly explores all of the above, although with a conceptual complexity that rather drains the life out of the story.
It starts explosively. A male professor in Miden, a utopian island rebuilt after an undefined calamity termed “the Crash”, is accused of raping one of his female students. The two of them were having an affair. Two years after it is over she turns up to tell the professor’s girlfriend that she now believes the affair to have been a sequence of acts of sexual violence. “I didn’t know then,” the girl explains. “Now I know.”
This is all dealt with in the first few pages. In the remaining 200 — told from the alternating, depersonalising viewpoints of “Him” (the professor) and “Her” (his girlfriend), the couple and the community react to the accusation. There can be no immorality in Miden and the allegation triggers an investigation by “the Commission”, to assess whether the professor’s presence now “compromises the social fabric”.
This investigation commandeers the story, dwarfing the more interesting, human narratives. The lifeblood of the story lies in the chasm that opens between Him and Her — in Her struggle to cope with her position as “a rapist’s girlfriend”; and in the contrast between His romantic recollections of the affair with the student (“It was beautiful”), versus the student’s (re)definition of their whole liaison as coercion. “What was in my head?” he asks at one point, genuinely unsure.
But instead, unfortunately, Raimo concentrates too much on the world of Miden: a smug, bloodless place governed by rules, rankings and ideals that veers close to parody (especially as everyone is wearing clogs — a detail I could not quite take seriously). “Miden is an act of faith,” offers one good citizen. “It means to believe in humanity.” Massive eye-roll.
The translation from Italian doesn’t always cope well with the novel’s abstractness, either. Some sentences are not so much stumbling blocks as brick walls: “A doggedness that was then occulted with stylistic flair to leave nothing behind, but the final result in all its clarity.” What? The Girl at the Door explores power, but it ultimately lacks potency.
The Girl at the Door by Veronica Raimo translated by Stash Luczkiw (4th Estate, £12.99)
