Can You Hear Me?

Can You Hear Me? by Elena Varvello can best described as coming of age noir, but there is very little suspense.

“In August of 1978, the summer I met Anna Trabuio, my father took a girl into the woods.” While specifying the year and the season, naming a seminal character, this opening sentence is a “tell,” a revealing piece of information most fans of suspense don’t appreciate unless the book’s focus is on identifying and apprehending the father.

That is not the case in Can You Hear Me? The book’s focus is split between 16-year-old Elia Furenti’s self-absorbed and fairly typical teenage angst, and his father Ettore’s rapidly declining mental health with more emphasis on angst than mental health.

Three elements increase the reader’s sense of anxiety: the dismal and isolated setting of the Furenti farmhouse near the small Italian village of Ponte; the smothering August heat interrupted by fierce thunderstorms; and Elia’s mother’s willful blindness to his father’s increasingly erratic behavior, acerbated by losing his job when the local mill closed. “You’re just a little confused. I know this is hard.”

Dismissing his wife’s objections, Ettore buys an old van, lets his beard grow out, shaves his head, and begins staying out until late at night. When a young boy is murdered after being abducted, Ettore reverses himself and shaves off his beard and lets his hair grow out. It is at this point that Elia finds a cut-up newspaper with only the murdered boy’s photograph intact, and he stops going out with his friends.

Bored and beginning to withdraw from his father, Elia wants things to return to normal even if “normal” isn’t carefree and happy. “I often thought about what happened—the thuds and his yelling—and I was always wary. Restless.”

When his father seems to have calmed down, his mother assures Elia that “It was a bad dream, Elia, but he’s awake now.”

Elia doesn’t wholly accept his mother’s assurances and continues to isolate himself. “I’d stay in my room for hours, reading comics.”

Elia’s isolation is broken by the arrival of a new boy, Santo Trabuio, and more importantly, his mother Anna. Like Elia, Santo is also an angry teenager, resentful of adult decisions and behavior over which he has no control. His mother, Anna, and he, have come to live with Santo’s grandfather, leaving his father behind.

The boys smoke, trespass on the empty’s mill’s property, and generally hang out. Elia suspects Santo is stealing from his mother and grandfather, but says nothing, his attention increasingly focusing on Anna. His sexual attraction toward his friend’s mother confuses him, but doesn’t necessarily cause him to feel shame. “I was sixteen and I was sitting next to the woman I lately hadn’t stopped thinking about.”

As the sexual attraction between Anna and Elia escalates, short chapters of Ettore’s abduction of the girl and escalation of his psychosis mirror a twisted version of his son’s relationship with a woman. Elia and Anna are indulging in an unwise and questionable moral intimacy, but it is not violent. Ettore’s relationship is illegal, immoral, and forced.

Santo discovers Elia and Anna in bed together, and explodes in rage, their friendship ending in an ugly fight that sends Elia back to his unhappy and unstable home.

Both Anna and Elia’s mother are in a sense enablers, Anna by surrendering to her sexual desires for her son’s friend, and Elia’s mother for ignoring and excusing her husband’s behavior in the name of unconditional love.

Can You Hear Me? is a dark and uncomfortable story, with no truly likeable character, but a compelling read in the sense that one is witness to an inevitable tragedy.

The portrait of Ettore is painfully realistic as the author’s own father suffered from a mental illness, so Varvello draws on personal experience to shape his character. Elia’s reactions to his father’s behavior, his increasing fear and unrecognized anger are also painfully realistic.

The writing is not eloquent, but reflect the age and lack of education of Elia as narrator. One does not expect eloquence from a teenager.

Can You Hear Me? is an inspired choice for a title as Ettore cries out to Elia who doesn’t understand what his father is saying and can provide no help. The cries for help by the other characters are for the most part silent, as each hold their secret fears within themselves.

Uncomfortable and even painful as reading Can You Hear Me? may be, those who are fascinated by the psychology of bipolar or psychotic personalities and their impact on individuals and on family life will find this novel compelling, even hypnotic, in its appeal.