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The Brittle Age<\/p>\n
Amanda now stays in her room, barely eating, rarely washing. Lucia finds her daughter unreachable. They hardly speak. \u201cEven a look from me can annoy her,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Eventually, though, the reader starts to suspect that Lucia struggles to deal with Amanda\u2019s trauma because she has never dealt with her own.<\/p>\n
Over 20 years ago, when Lucia was the same age as Amanda is now \u2014 \u201cthe brittle age\u201d of the title \u2014 two young women were murdered and another wounded near a campground in the impoverished rural area where Lucia lived with her parents.<\/p>\n
Though it\u2019s hard at first for Lucia to look directly at this event, the terrors of that night gradually come out.<\/p>\n
At the foot of the mountains ominously called Il Dente del Lupo (\u201cthe wolf\u2019s teeth\u201d), law enforcement officers and men from the nearby village look for three missing women, including Doralice, Lucia\u2019s childhood friend. The teenaged Lucia waits, overwhelmed with guilt and fear. Doralice might have been with Lucia that evening instead of at the campground, except that Lucia went to the beach with her new city friends, ashamed of Doralice\u2019s country dialect and not wanting to bring her along.<\/p>\n
The account of the crime and its aftermath \u2014 the search-and-rescue operation, the arrest, the trial \u2014 is interspersed with Lucia\u2019s current mid-life concerns. Gradually, we learn of Lucia\u2019s difficult relationship with her taciturn elderly father, who now lives alone in the hills, the tensions with her estranged husband, the feelings of helplessness as she watches her daughter, unable to connect.<\/p>\n
Through Lucia\u2019s somewhat cool first-person narrative, Di Pietrantonio suggests these present-day problems might actually be related to Lucia\u2019s past, that the murders marked Lucia in ways she is only now starting to realize.<\/p>\n
There are universal issues here. The novel is about the tensions between mothers and daughters, about the way children\u2019s lives move beyond their parents. \u201cChildren \u2014 there are so many ways of losing them,\u201d Lucia thinks at one point. Lucia feels that through education, a profession and life in the city, she has escaped the hardscrabble existence of her own mother. Now she is baffled that Amanda seems to be deliberately turning her back on the middle-class privileges for which Lucia worked so hard.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Leonardo Cendamo photo<\/p>\n Di Pietrantonio\u2019s short, shifting chapters and plain words, often abrupt and tense, hide a dark and complicated poetry in her novel which, at its core, is about crimes against women.<\/p>\n \n\t\tWinnipeg Free Press | Newsletter\n\t<\/p>\n \t\t But woven into these dynamics is fear. Lucia comes to see that while Amanda has healed physically from her attack, there is a deeper wound: \u201cHer trust in the world had been ripped away from her.\u201d She realizes her own trust ended that night all those years ago, when she realized that no place was safe. As the prosecutor of the case says, \u201cWherever man goes, he can bring evil.\u201d<\/p>\n At its core, The Brittle Age is about crimes against women, but Di Pietrantonio is careful to avoid the problems often seen in the true-crime genre. She refuses to sensationalize, to speculate, to over-explain.<\/p>\n She uses short, shifting chapters and plain words, often abrupt and tense, that hide a dark and complicated poetry. (The translator is Ann Goldstein, the English translator for Elena Ferrante.) <\/p>\n Looking obliquely at the long shadows cast by violence, The Brittle Age is both harrowing and guardedly hopeful.<\/p>\n Alison Gillmor writes on pop culture for the Free Press.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t Alison Gillmor Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto\u2019s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.<\/p>\n
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