Giuseppe leaves Italy for Princeton, New Jersey where his newlywed brother has promised him a teacher of Biology position. Cousin Roberta keeps him up to date on what has happened to his apartment since the new neighbors moved in. She also supplies very gossipy reports on the doings of Giuseppe's movie-maker son, Alberico and exlover, Lucrezia. But, Giuseppe and Roberta are not the only ones in communication. Letters confirming and denying gossip and truth fly back and forth between various friends, lovers, and family. The different perspectives remind me of Michael Dorris's Yellow Raft in Blue Water.
Confessional: In the beginning I had to keep a notebook of all the characters writing back and forth to one another; the correspondence of family members referencing other family members, neighbors, and friends all flowed back and forth like a storm-tossed tide. But like any written correspondence there are gaps in information and speculation fills those gaps. Is Lucrezia in love with Ignazio Fegiz? She can barely stand to write his name. Hints becomes reality. It was interesting to see the cycle of relationships, people moving back to one another while others move on entirely. ( )

The City and the House is a very readable epistolary novel about a group of friends who slowly drift apart. While it seems to be superficially about the small and large events in the lives of several people, the book’s underlying topics include the importance of not just individual friendships, but a community, the constant yearning for the past which often becomes idealized and the ability of people to form new social circles which take the place of family and older bonds – often imperfect, but not less important.

The main characters are Lucrezia, a married woman with an ever-growing number of children and a placidly indifferent husband, her former lover and now friend Giuseppe, whose move to America propels the exchange of letters, and their circle of friends and relatives who constantly hang around Lucrezia and Piero’s house, Le Margherite. After the couple sells the house, they – and all they friends – come to think of it (as well as the past) as a lost paradise that they all vainly try to recreate. But though many of their new relationships are driven by propinquity rather than like feeling, they are nonetheless important. While many others will comment on the unsuitability of this or that lover or spouse, the characters usually stick with them and are generally accepting. This may be more inertia than anything else, but the importance of even the ill-suited connections isn’t denied. Occasionally, a new relationship can spark and bring happiness for a while even if they don’t last.

The epistolary format certainly seems nostalgic now (emails, Facebook etc) even though the characters will sometimes refer to phone conversations that they had. It does, however, heighten the impact of the announcement of various events – pregnancies, deaths, marriages. Though the reader might not be familiar with some character who has just been mentioned in a letter (since they never appeared as a letter-writer), they can recognize the impact that it will have on a central character.

The dissolution of many old relationships occurs sadly but naturally as the friends and relatives drift away. They all remember Le Margherite wistfully, but it was not perfect at the time. Lucrezia was a serial adulterer and even the rift between her and Giuseppe, due to her breaking off their relationship, hasn’t been fully mended. He denies that he’s the father of one of her children (his least favorite, he constantly mentions) while she firmly asserts that he is. Their other friends also had the usual tensions and character problems that will crop up in any group of people – the romantic tension between Albina and Egisto (which both blame on the other), Egisto’s natural anti-social tendencies, Serena’s self-centered outlook on life.

After the breakup of the Le Margherite group, Albina drifts away to her family and a conventional if unsatisfying life, Egisto makes an effort to befriend his neighbors – Giuseppe’s son and his roommates, and Serena finds a new group to support her actor/artist ambitions and rather coldly leaves everyone else behind. Lucrezia’s latest affair is seen by all (as well as the reader) as likely to end in implosion and Giuseppe makes an ill-matched marriage of convenience.

Good but quietly sad. ( )