An Italian Affair

Laura Fraser’s An Italian Affair features Italy as a placid stage for potential transformation of the privileged, white, American, female views of the feminine body. The Italy An Italian Affair features is nonthreatening—except for a mention of Naples as “no place for a single woman alone”—and stripped of struggle or inconvenience; it is charming, its people distinctly backwoods, asking if there are still gunslingers (in such a way that sounds like “Injuns” to me) in the American West, coldly judging women emerging from men’s rooms in the early morning, and incapable of comprehending a single woman of a certain age. The men “you”, Laura, meet are centered on the female body, but distant, they desire Laura’s body as a tawdry thing and fail at passion; though Laura seems to find the art professor’s touching of her steamy, the novel skips over the situations it sets up as sensual. Laura’s female friends and a shop clerk attempt to convince her that her body and its curves are attractive to no avail, creating a tired trope from TV, the inconvincible woman. Laura travels through Italy, namedropping and spa bathing, but the events that take place during her trips seem universal to any vacation spot—the meeting of another non-national. The novel thus far is more about personal, privileged, and reflexive views of the female body when dropped into a, names aside, nonspecific, othered locale, rather than how distinctly Italian views of body and pleasure can transform a jilted divorcee.