FICTION
Return To Valetto
Dominic Smith, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

Valetto, the setting for Dominic Smith’s latest novel, is an (entirely imaginary) town in Umbria. It is perfectly appropriate that he has invented it because the many real towns and villages in Italy of which it is a simulacrum seem more like ghosts or fictions, hollowed out by poverty, earthquakes, emigration, leaving them as crumbling dioramas with a handful of ageing residents the last barrier against complete abandonment.

In Valetto the handful is only 10 strong, and four of them are the three aunts and grandmother of the central character, Hugh. He is an American academic whose mother, the fourth sister, broke away for reasons that eventually become apparent. He is a historian. “I specialise in abandonment,” is his semi-ironic self-definition, and he has written a well-received book about abandoned towns and villages in Italy, which is why he has come back to Valetto, where he spent many childhood summers.

He has also lost his wife and mother within four years, and is nowhere near processing his grief, especially for his wife. So abandonment runs through everything, and Hugh’s grief is entirely believable and felt, with only the occasional dips into mawkishness: and these are redeemed by the relationship he has with his daughter, who gently, teasingly, prods him towards a new start.

Hugh has a nice turn of phrase, a droll eye, and so gets us quickly established in this dying village where the remnants of his family live, almost mouldering, in their separate apartments. It is no kind of plot spoiler to say that there are secrets at the heart of the book, since even if they were not in the DNA of a book like this, it says so on the front cover. But it’s a story that neither has nor needs real narrative tension to achieve its aims.

Loading

The initial catalyst for revelation is a middle-aged woman, Elisa Tomassi, who has turned up in Valetto and laid claim to, and is squatting in, the villa left to Hugh by his mother. She claims that Hugh’s grandfather, Aldo, who disappeared in 1944, had turned up in her home village in Piedmont and joined the partisans, later giving this villa to her family to thank them for hiding and protecting him. Cue some rather theatrical fury from Hugh’s grandma and aunties, legal wranglings, even a graphologist.

Initially, it seems that the dispute could go either way, unlike the outcome for Hugh and Elisa, which is locked in from the moment he first claps eyes on her. “Elisa lifted her chin and brought her light brown eyes up at me under the fur fringe of her hood. I was standing close enough to see that there were tiny flecks of gold and copper in her irises.” Flecks only mean one thing in a book.

She is a talented chef, and food is a prominent trope in the book. In the family history, in the history of Valetto, in Elisa’s life, in their circling each other, in the resolution of the plot, food has a role, at times a heightened, ineffable one, as it so often does in books like this. Return to Valetto is very much “a book like this”, which is exactly what it is supposed to be.