Florence in Ecstasy by Jessie Chaffee (review)

Florence in Ecstasy, Jessie Chaffee's debut novel, is a classic expatriate novel that takes the genre in new directions. There's a reason that so many novels about Americans take place in Italy. For American writers, Italy is a country that's tailor-made for epiphanies, a place where antiquity and its remnants make it easy to glimpse the sublime. On the Spanish Steps, or in the halls of the Colosseum, Americans are likelier than not to feel a kind of historical vertigo perfect for characters synthesizing whatever has happened to them. A big chunk of John Cheever's work takes place in the Eternal City, and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of expat artists in his lengthy novel The Marble Faun. Regardless of the era or the writer, the country is normally depicted as a florid photonegative of home, where the presence of history is so palpable it's disturbing to those who aren't used to it.

While Chafee hits many familiar beats for a story about Americans in Italy, it's also a hard-to-read chronicle of one woman's struggle with anorexia, which recalls the more harrowing memoirs of the late Nineties and early Aughts. By combining Hannah's memoir-like vulnerability with the strange-land hallmarks of an expat novel, Chaffee creates something more surprising: a story of isolation, abroad.

The plot, which is mostly linear, centers on Hannah, a woman in her 30s, who exiles herself to Florence after her life in Boston falls apart. Hannah's anorexia causes her to lose her job—her coworkers catch her purging in a bathroom at a corporate event. Hannah views her illness in mystical terms, as a specter or "friend" she can't shake, and, like many classic expat protagonists, she doesn't like to talk about her past. Throughout the novel, her sister calls her and leaves voicemails that are angry or pleading, reminding Hannah that she left Boston without settling any of her affairs. At various points, she also fields emails from her ex-boss, who'd tried and failed to get Hannah to seek real help back at home. As befits a character with radical and crushing self-image problems, Hannah is unbearably self-conscious, and many of the novel's best passages are accounts of her pettiest worries. In restaurants, she mimics eating food, an act which turns out to be difficult in a country like Italy, where it's normal for two people to spend hours on a nine-course meal. In flashbacks, Hannah recounts how her illness gradually developed, recounting, with ample self-loathing, her lies to friends and family, her unctuous and ingratiating doctor, her growing substitution of wine for any real sustenance, and her sense that everything she eats irreparably bloats her figure. She has a social life, or rather one comes to her, but it's always clear that her struggle is one of internal torment.

Her mental landscape is achingly similar from day to day. Regardless of where she goes, to use an idiom, there she is. And because she can't distance herself from her illness in a meaningful way, the novel spends much of its time portraying her inner monologue devouring her. In a long, disorienting section near the end, a standout in the novel in many ways, the paragraph structure breaks down into a form that's not unlike poetry. As her anorexia grows worse, Hannah leaves Florence in a miserable, self-imposed fugue state, wandering around Italy while frantically comparing her plight to that of St. Catherine, a 12^th-century martyr who starved herself to death at 33. Her breakdown, which is detailed in prose that itself grows increasingly disordered, is perhaps the novel's best marriage of stylistic play and content. It's the scene where the book most effectively gives the reader a sense of Hannah's illness.

Working less well, in contrast, are the book's extended dialogues, which largely take place between Hannah and the the members of a rowing club she...