Heddi GoodrichLost in the Spanish Quarter

Heddi Goodrich Lost in the Spanish Quarter New York. HarperVia. 2019. 387 pages. SOMETIMES A NOVEL stands out less for its content and more for its very existence . Such a novel is Lost in the Spanish Quarter, by Heddi Goodrich, which distinguishes itself from other recently translated works—and other books set in Italy—for several notable reasons. For starters, the author and the translator are the same person . Goodrich originally wrote the novel in Italian and then translated it herself. What’s more, the book, which revisits a failed love affair between university students, is set in Naples, a fascinating Italian city that is less known to foreigners. Lastly, it was published by a new imprint of Harper called HarperVia , aimed at spotlighting “international voices.” The book is Goodrich’s debut novel. The author moved to Naples while she was in high school and remained there for university , graduating from L’Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” with a master’s degree in languages. Her biography positions her well to bring a new perspective to the literary sphere since far fewer books in the English-speaking world have been written about or set in Naples. As she writes in the novel, “Naples was never a choice. It was a gift that had to be forced on you, by birth or by fate.” The work tells the story of Heddi, an American student in Naples (like the author), and her group of Italian friends, including Pietro, from rural southern Italy, who quickly becomes her lover. The novel delivers in breathless fashion their whirlwind love story as it plays out in the exotic locale of Naples’s Spanish Quarter. Indeed, it reads like other college novels—lots of drinking and overthinking plus grousing about professors and classes. The setting, however, allows Goodrich to evoke class tensions and regional differences against the backdrop of the idiosyncratic Italian university system. Goodrich also taps into the rich epistolary tradition, and the parts of the book dedicated to Heddi’s and Pietro’s letters are the most enjoyable. The exchanges take place years after the relationship has wound down, and the narrative pivots between scenes of the love affair and the letters. Arguably, some of what distinguishes the book also hampers it as a novel for the English-speaking market. When Goodrich originally wrote the work in Italian, she could avail herself of a language full of impossibly long sentences whose clauses have clauses. That type of meandering prose doesn’t always translate well into English. a wealth of examples, where anatomy or behavior has evolved in a way that is dependent on the presence of certain genes and abilities in other organisms. Human speech might be one of the most direct illustration of this principle. Genes and cultures both evolve in response to the other, without being clearly separable. The social suite is an evolved expression of our genes outside of our bodies, something Christakis calls “exophenotype” and Dawkins before him has referred to as “extended phenotype”— something that an organism is genetically compelled to enact. Whereas classical examples of extended phenotypes are birds’ nests or spiderwebs, structures encoded in an organism’s genes built without any prior learning, Blueprint takes this concept to a new level of complexity with the societies we build. In his preface, Christakis gives some implicit credit in stating that “our good deeds are not just the products of Enlightenment values. They have a deeper and prehistoric origin.” However, when he later comes to develop the holism of genetic and cultural evolution, he fails to discuss how reason, science, or humanism might imprint on our biology or vice versa. In both his optimism and data-heavy arguments, Christakis’s book resembles Steven Pinker ’s Enlightenment Now, published only a year prior, in which the author builds the case for Enlightenment values and their role in the prosperity, health, and happiness of human societies that have adapted them over the past centuries. To a degree, these books feel like two parts of the same project. It might therefore seem disappointing that, when Christakis discusses the inherent interplay of biological and cultural evolution, he fails to pick up what he...

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