Synopsis

It's election night. Bruna—a political science professor at a New York college—has been on TV to comment on the results, but the anguish she feels upon returning home isn't due to the Republican candidate's victory but rather to the secret she must confess to her husband, Tom. Long shadows have long loomed over their marriage: that of Tom's parents, respectable, radically conservative Italian-Americans; the shadow of their tormented son Mario, who manifests early discomfort with his male body; that of the alien number assigned to Bruna by US bureaucracy. This book is the story of a family, its secrets, the challenges it faces, but it is also a plea to all of us. Yunus, the young African-American student with whom Bruna has begun a relationship, leaves her a memoir that is an indictment of the hypocrisy of Western democracies, a novel within a novel and a love letter. Each of the protagonists walks alone, in a darkness stronger than the lights of Manhattan, in a dogged search for their own identity. Arianna Farinelli uses diversity—ethnic, cultural, religious, gender—as the lens through which to measure the world we live in. And through Yunus's voice, she holds up Grant Wood's painting, American Gothic, as a mirror: "White faces of frightened old men who think they're protecting the world with a pitchfork, but their world no longer exists." It is the voice of those who have lost everything except the hope that words can build bridges toward a future of equality and freedom.