“What’s the novel about if not getting fucked.” In their celebrated first novel, Crudo, Olivia Laing asks this excellent question. Or rather, Laing outsources the question — one about the novel form in general — to Crudo’s protagonist, who both is and is not Laing and both is and is not Kathy Acker. Laing is a prize-winning English writer and art critic whose many books attest to their varied interests: painting, protest, gardening, acting, alcoholic writers, and queer subcultures. Acker was an avant-garde novelist, poet, and performance artist who died of breast cancer in 1997. Laing and Acker share a fascination with Pier Paolo Pasolini, the iconic Italian filmmaker, a gay communist who was the subject of a novel by Acker called My Life My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini. A tribute to Pasolini, Laing’s new novel, The Silver Book, implicitly pays tribute to Acker as well. Here Laing also returns to the theory that Crudo offers in passing. As though confirming that theory’s validity, The Silver Book is a novel about getting fucked and fucked over.
In other ways, though, Laing’s second novel differs radically from their first. Crudo was both written and set in the summer of 2017, a record of the present. The Silver Book is a work of historical fiction, marketed as a “queer love story and a noirish thriller.” It is also a tale of two film productions. Its protagonist, the English art school graduate Nicholas Wade, falls in with an older and more dapper Italian, Danilo Donati. Although the latter’s presence is commanding from the first (he has a “broad chest, thick thighs, fat cock,” and “a machismo” that nicely complements “the quick, queeny, almost mocking elegance of his hands”), Donati lives to serve. He works as a costume and set designer for both Federico Fellini and Pasolini, and when The Silver Book begins, Danilo is helping to bring Fellini’s Casanova into being.
That’s not a misprint but the real title of Fellini’s film, a monument to the auteur’s enormous ego. It’s not easy to work with someone so supremely convinced of his own genius and yet always asking to be reminded of his greatness. Fed up with Fellini, Danilo travels to Venice “to sulk, magnificently.” (“Fuck Fellini.”) At the same time, never not on the job, he collects architectural details to bring back to the film’s perfectionist set. It’s in Venice, the backdrop of many a meet-cute, that he comes to appreciate Nick’s keen eye, as well as his fuckable young body. The English artist soon becomes Danilo’s apprentice.
Midway through the novel, a break in the eventful production of Fellini’s Casanova allows for a detour through Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom before Fellini’s project resumes. Together and sometimes apart, Nick and Danilo work on both films, and the novel stages a parade of great directors and performers, whose antics we observe mostly through Nick’s eyes. (Danilo is based on a historical figure; Nick seems to be an invention of Laing’s own.)
A small-time protagonist bumps up against — he is fondled and fucked by — big names in history. The conceit might seem unpromising, like a gay Forrest Gump, but Laing reinvents it admirably. They are especially interested in the differences between the two cinematic set pieces, two adaptations of eighteenth-century sources (Fellini’s of Giacomo Casanova and Pasolini’s of the Marquis de Sade). The contrast structures The Silver Book, and taken together, the two films let Laing cover more geographical and historical ground. Fellini’s Casanova was filmed at the fabled studios at Cinecittà in Rome, where, in Laing’s novel, though on its last legs, a version of la dolce vita lives on. Salò, by contrast, was shot on location in and around the former Salò Republic in northern Italy. Here, as the Second World War neared its end, Benito Mussolini led a Nazi puppet state, fascism’s last redoubt.
A small-time protagonist bumps up against — he is fondled and fucked by — big names in history.
Except it wasn’t fascism’s last redoubt. In his late writings, Pasolini argued that the regime’s sensibilities had persisted in the postwar period and that its politics had survived after the official triumph of the antifascist resistance. Never mind that the duce had been hanged. According to Pasolini, the “neocapitalism” that emerged after the end of the war was even worse, even more fascistic, than fascism in full uniform. At least the latter, which made a spectacle of itself, could be recognized and so opposed. What Pasolini called postwar “neofascism,” by contrast, had become much more difficult to locate because it had been internalized by the whole populace. Everyone had been made to eat shit, as in Salò’s still-famous scenes of collective coprophagy. But those scenes made stagey and starkly visible something that had long since ceased to register, like a land mine left unexploded. Most of the time, under neofascism, consumers liked and even thoroughly enjoyed what they were served: mass-produced products made from U.S. compounds, which were ingested but could not be metabolized. Fascism had become a kind of forever chemical, kept in permanent circulation like microplastics.
That fascism is, in Laing’s words, “still alive, still straining at the leash,” will not be news to today’s readers. Laing understands this, and as The Silver Book approaches its climax — a retelling of the story of Pasolini’s murder in what remains a cold case to this day — it becomes a meditation on the fate of fascist impulses, an oblique reflection on their resurgence in the present. In Italy, the “Years of Lead,” dating from the late 1960s to the 1980s, saw prolonged social conflict and heightened political violence. The Silver Book hopes to be a novel for what some call our own Years of Lead.
I am of two minds about whether Laing pulls this off. Or maybe I think Laing is of two minds, like someone shuttling between Fellini’s set and Pasolini’s, or like someone who sometimes is and sometimes is not Kathy Acker. Mostly, in The Silver Book, they’re not Acker. And yet, the late novelist lingers in the background. In My Life My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Acker fictionalized the director’s last hours luridly before embarking on an absurdist mission that left both his death and his life behind. The result was incoherent by design (“I, Pier Paolo Pasolini, will solve my murder by denying the principle of causation”) and less readable by far than The Silver Book. Consuming Acker’s logorrheic novel is the readerly equivalent of eating shit and knowing it.
It was distasteful to return to Acker after enjoying Laing; My Life My Death made me miss the friendlier storytelling of The Silver Book. But the experience also helped me to understand a hesitation that I hadn’t been able to formulate: It was the very readability of Laing’s novel that gave me pause. I read The Silver Book on a plane and found it perfect for the trip. The chapters are short, the sentences clipped, the prose propulsive. It left me wondering what had happened to the longer, less predictable sentences of Laing’s brilliant Everybody: A Book About Freedom, or even the appealing mess of Crudo, a novel written quickly, “in real time,” in an effort to preserve rather than smooth over the sharp edges of life under the first Trump administration.
Released during Trump’s second term, which is even more openly fascistic, The Silver Book is much smoother. Like Salò, it’s polished, but unlike any of Pasolini’s films, it rarely jostles or unsettles us. Replete with easter eggs awaiting recognition by cinephiles, it satisfies us rather than frustrating or enraging or deranging our sensibilities. Even the didactic moments, meant to render Pasolini at his most outrageous and politically provocative, are easily digestible. “My friend,” Laing’s Pasolini says to an actor on the set of Salò, “we are demonstrating that facts are immaterial in fascism, that truth is dead, that meaning is on a permanent migration.” Pasolini’s late essays are explosive (“a petrol bomb in paper form,” as Laing rightly remembers), but here, the fictional Pasolini sounds anodyne, like someone repeating talking points from MSNBC.
Here, the fictional Pasolini sounds anodyne, like someone repeating talking points from MSNBC.
Compare Laing’s lament about the death of truth to Pasolini’s own insistence, in his last interview, that “refusal must be total and not partial.” Asked if he’s nostalgic for a bygone world — already a frequent accusation during his lifetime — he responds: “I miss the poor and genuine people who fought to abolish their master without turning into him.” He says repeatedly that he wants to “abolish” and “demolish” the world, the whole “horrid order,” in which would-be masters proliferate. In The Silver Book, this Pasolini, who remained revolutionary to the last, has left almost no trace.
This might not come as a surprise to readers of Laing’s other work. There is, for example, a kind of liberal cringe already latent in Crudo: “She missed Obama. Everyone missed Obama.” Or: “It was England, she’d miss it, even as it became unrecognisable, officially racist.” Disclosures like these are in keeping with Crudo’s spirit of candor and skin contact, but they are also embarrassing. They suggest that the narrator — who, when the novel begins, has “accidentally gone on holiday with the super-rich” — is confused in more ways than she knows. To her credit, though, this narrator does not pretend to show us the way out of the “fire and fascism” that she reads about on Twitter.
The stakes are higher in The Silver Book, which reminds us, if we need reminding, of Pasolini’s prescience. Laing rejects the homophobic framing of the filmmaker’s murder as “a trick gone wrong,” an elaborate, perverse sort of self-punishment, or a suicide by proxy. Like many others who view his killing as a political assassination, Laing does not believe that Pino Pelosi, who confessed, acted alone. (No relation, presumably, to Nancy.) According to The Silver Book, the killing was the price that Pasolini paid for having delivered so many loud “warnings about a system in which we are all enmeshed.” Note Laing’s present tense, which says clearly: The system still lives.
Here, though, is what Pasolini’s warnings sound like in The Silver Book: “Pasolini says that violence happens on all levels of society. He says the poor might use a metal bar and the rich a stock-exchange manoeuvre.” “What he sees is how we all turn a blind eye to evil because we are comfortable and we want to stay that way.” Okay. These insights are so general that they’re safe, nonthreatening, and familiar, even comfortable.
Laing does not share the further conclusion that Pasolini drew on the basis of these general claims: that we needed to be made uncomfortable. Only being interrupted in our habits of easy consumption — being made, say, to view an agonizing film like Salò, which begins with a bibliography that assigns difficult, “essential” reading, or being challenged to work through an often-unreadable novel like Pasolini’s unfinished, infernal Petrolio — could end our complacency. If, as Laing writes, channeling Pasolini, “we are sleepwalkers like the children in Salò,” then the film’s aim is to wake and keep us up. All of Pasolini’s final projects sought to make it difficult for readers and viewers to return to a state of false security and willful blindness, the mass conditions that make fascism possible. His last works hound and harangue us, sparing no one.
Written for an age of algorithmically delivered easy listening, The Silver Book is kinder and gentler. Laing believes in pleasure; in the end, I think, their loyalties are more Felliniesque than Pasolinian. They prefer Fellini’s circuses, his kaleidoscopic journeys and quixotic quests, to the ordeal that is Salò. They prefer his banquets, with their breaks for introspection, to Pasolini’s scenes of torture, punishment, and proletarian sacrifice. In other words, they prefer aesthetics with a hint, not a heavy dose, of politics. Fellini’s Casanova revels in its own artifice, its campiness, and its commitment to the pleasures of the flesh. So, too, does The Silver Book, which honors the silver screen. That the screen is silver means it’s not lead.
Still, in one sense, it is Pasolini who presides over Laing’s novel, not the officially straight Fellini, whose closest relationships were with his young male assistants — including, at one point, Pasolini himself. The Silver Book is a fascinated portrait of gay male life: of making art, attending to detail, cruising, loving, partying, losing. Not your mother’s Golden Notebook, The Silver Book is, for this reason, full of men. In fact, there are so few women with speaking parts in Laing’s novel that it recalls Alan Hollinghurst’s seamy and supremely gay The Swimming-Pool Library. (In that novel, someone at a performance of the opera Billy Budd remarks, “I always think how funny, there not being any women in it. Some people claim not to notice.” He is describing both the opera and Hollinghurst’s novel itself.) To observe this is not to find fault with The Silver Book. Laing, who is non-binary, has written movingly about feeling like “a boy inside, a femme gay boy.” “A fag with tits” is what Laing calls Crudo’s narrator. In The Silver Book, they unapologetically render the world from a fag’s point of view.
Which brings us back to getting fucked. Laing’s novel attests to the long shelf life of a shared fantasy about what that phrase can mean, all that it can promise. According to the logic of this fantasy, getting fucked is itself a politics, or is better than politics. It’s mind-blowing, earth-shattering — as we now say, it’s everything — and the fag remains its poster child. The paradigmatically fucked figure, he carries the torch for those who — like Fellini, his Casanova, and Laing — still want to believe in bodies and pleasures, in fun. The desire to sustain this belief is, of course, understandable. Who, after all, wants to work through antifascist doom and gloom when there is meth in Venice? Late in his life, Pasolini came to see struggle as indispensable, even in film and fiction. For him, the party was over, and fun was all too compatible with fascism.
Ramsey McGlazer lives in Oakland and teaches at UC Berkeley.
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