Lost Youth, Again

The Age of Malaise, replete with an enticing picture of author Dacia Maraini on the dust jacket, comes highly recommended. Written by an Italian girl in her mid-twenties, this novel of the "young, postwar generation" won the second annual $10,000 Formentor Prize, an award established by thirteen publishers in as many countries to encourage and publicize young writing. Each of the thirteen houses, including Grove Press of the United States, will publish Miss Maraini's work in its own country.

If this is the best an international cabal of publishing potentates could do, then our young writers had a singularly unproductive year. The Age of Malaise is not a bad book, but it is an uninspired, and uninspiring one. It flits from bedroom to passion-fraught bedroom following the heroine, a 17 year-old stenography student named Enrica, who clearly is searching for something to bring meaning to her darb existence.

The key to her search is revealed, as if we didn't know, in a hurried conversation on a dance floor with the 18 year-old lover of a dilapidated contessa. "What interests you most in life?" Enrica is asked, as the wealthy contessa (Enrica's employer) watches from the sidelines of a Roman night-club. "I don't know. Love I suppose" she murmurs in typical fashion.

Aha! Enrica is gripped by a malaise, an indifference, a purposelessness that supposedly characterizes the youth of her generation. But underneath this veneer there is a grave, unfulfilled need to love and be loved, to find meaning in sex and passion.

Now that's not a bad theme for a novel. Every story has been told before, so one cannot hold that against Miss Maraini. But there is one major flaw to this particular rendition. Enrica apparently finds happiness only in her relationship with Cesare, an unfeeling and mercenary law student, who continues to sleep with her until 10 days before his wedding. Yet Enrica's love is totally inexplicable, incredibly far-fetched. One gets no feeling that her redemption lies in love, because it just simply is not there, despite her repeated pleadings to share Cesare's bed.

In the failure to communicate Enrica's love, Miss Maraini has reduced much of her heroine's protestations to absurdity. On the other hand, if Enrica is indeed incapable of love, and has just been fooling herself and the reader with all her sexual antics, the hopeful note on which the book ends is unbelievable.

Miss Maraini's style is incredibly spare and direct, and reads easily. But it is almost totally devoid of any poetry, and one is left more with a feeling of having read a newspaper account than a novel. What's more, it is boring.

In a curious way this could be Miss Maraini's point. By building in the reader a feelng of ennui perhaps she hopes to communicate that quality in Enrica's world. About the only variety in her life, and this too is minimal, are the scenes of her love-making. Usually it is in Cesare's bedroom, but once he takes her on the shore of a lake, and another boy makes her on the damp floor of an abandoned workman's shed.

Yet one cannot help but feel there are more effective, not too mention more entertaining, ways of communicating a feeling of malaise than boring your reader to tears.