The Italian Teacher: A Novel

by Tom Rachman

Overview

“An exotic touch of intrigue arises in THE ITALIAN TEACHER . . . deliciously ironic and deeply affectionate.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
 
A masterful novel about the son of a great painter striving to create his own legacy, by the bestselling author of The Imperfectionists.

Conceived while his father, Bear, cavorted around Rome in the 1950s, Pinch learns quickly that Bear's genius trumps all. After Bear abandons his family, Pinch strives to make himself worthy of his father's attention—first trying to be a painter himself; then resolving to write his father's biography; eventually settling, disillusioned, into a job as an Italian teacher in London. But when Bear dies, Pinch hatches a scheme to secure his father's legacy—and make his own mark on the world.

With his signature humanity and humor, Tom Rachman examines a life lived in the shadow of greatness, cementing his place among his generation's most exciting literary voices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780735222700
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	841,563
Product dimensions:	5.29(w) x 7.96(h) x 0.77(d)

About the Author

Tom Rachman is the author of two novels, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (2014), and The Imperfectionists (2010), an international bestseller that has been translated into 25 languages. Rachman, who was born in London in 1974 and raised in Vancouver, studied journalism at Columbia University in New York. In 1998, he joined the Associated Press as a foreign-desk editor in New York, then became a correspondent in Rome in 2002. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Slate and The New Statesman, among other publications. He lives in London.

Read an Excerpt

Rome, 1955

1

Seated in a copper bathtub, Bear Bavinsky dunks his head under steaming water and shakes out his beard, flinging droplets across the art studio. He thumbs a bolt of shag into his pipe and flicks a brass Zippo lighter, sucking hard to draw down the flame, tobacco glowing devil-red, smoke coiling toward the wood-beam ceiling. He exhales and stands. Beads of water rain off his torso.

His five-year-old son, Pinch, hoists a thick bath towel, arms trembling under the weight. Bear runs his fingers through receding reddish-blond hair and—hand on the boy’s head for balance—steps onto newspapers previously used for wiping paintbrushes. His wet footprints bleed across the print, encircling dabs of oily blue and swipes of yellow.

“That’s final!” Natalie declares from across the studio, chewing her fingernail.

“Final, is it? You certain?” Bear asks his wife. “Not the slightest doubt?”

“All I’ve got is doubts.”

He proceeds to the iron front door and shoulders it open, dusky light from the alleyway pushing past him, glinting off glass pigment jars, illuminating abused paintbrushes in turpentine and canvases drying along the bare-brick walls. In the early-evening air, he stands in place, a fortyish male animal, naked but for the towel twisted around his neck, his shadow narrowing up the studio, hurdling the tub, darkening his wife and their little boy. “Absolutely positive then?”

Natalie yanks a strand of black hair over her eyes, wraps it around her baby finger, whose tip reddens. She darts into the WC at the back of the studio and closes the warped door, her head bumping the bare bulb, which alternates glare and gloom as she consults the mirror: emerald ball gown cinched at the waist, box-pleated skirt, polka-dot overlay. It’s as if she were wearing three outfits at once, none of them hers. She tucks her hair under a cream beret but it hardly helps, the same gawky twenty-six-year-old looking back, all elbows and knees, a manly jaw, deep- set black eyes, as uncertain as if drawn with smudged charcoal, the worry lines added in fine- nib pen.

She joins Bear, who remains naked in the doorway, a puff of smoke released from his pipe. “I’m not even acceptable,” she tells him, and he rests a rough palm against the swell of her bosom, firmly enough to quicken her pulse. He strides to his leather suitcase and plucks out neckties, one for himself, one for their son. Bear raises the louder tie, holding it up as if considering a mackerel. He sends Pinch to fetch the canvas shears, with which he snips one of the ties in half, twirling it around the boy’s neck. “What do you say, kiddo?” Bear grins, the beard rising to his eyes, which disappear into slits. “Natty, I love the hell out of you. And I listen the hell out of you. But damn it, sweetie, we are going.”

She clutches one hand in the other. “Well then, hurry!” she responds, quickstepping past her husband, nearly stumbling as she crouches to knot their son’s tie. Natalie touches Pinch’s forehead, her hand throbbing against his brow, jittery fingers like a secret message: “We waited all this time, Pinchy, and now he’s here!”

Bear, who moved in only weeks earlier, approaches his son, mussing the boy’s fine sandy hair (quite like Dad’s), playfully flicking the kid’s nervous chin (like his mother’s), while Pinch’s blue eyes (with an urgency all their own) gaze up, awaiting his father’s command.
 

Reading Group Guide

Seated in a copper bathtub, Bear Bavinsky dunks his head under steaming water and shakes out his beard, flinging droplets across the art studio. . . . He exhales and stands. Beads of water rain off his torso. His five-year-old son, Pinch, hoists a thick bath towel, arms trembling under the weight. Bear runs his fingers through receding reddish-blond hair and—hand on the boy’s head for balance—steps onto newspapers previously used for wiping paintbrushes. (page 3)

The Italian Teacher opens in Rome, 1955. Young Pinch lives with his mother, Natalie, a ceramicist, and father, the intense and riotous Bear Bavinsky, a celebrated painter. Both Natalie and Pinch blossom under the blaze that is Bear’s attention. Desperate to be a painter like his father, Pinch spends his every free moment studying the greats and emulates the man he sees as the greatest of them all. Bear’s favorite of his many children, Pinch itches to secure the artistic endorsement of his elusive father, who never stays in one place, or with one family, for long. But with only a few words, Bear dismisses his talent, and Pinch abandons painting for decades.

He turns to art history when he goes away to college, finding fellowship with the boisterous artist Marsden and love with an ambitious girlfriend, Cilla Barrows. Loyalty to Bear supersedes other connections, and as one effort after another falls through, Pinch settles into life as an Italian teacher in London. When Bear falls ill, though, Pinch sees a way to break free—and hatches an audacious plan to secure his father’s reputation while perhaps, at long last, proving to himself and the world that the spark of talent still burns in him.

As in his first two novels, Rachman demonstrates a genius for creating compelling characters who pursue their dreams even as they seem just a step out of reach. In his hands, Pinch—anxious to be successful and yearning to be loved—offers us a fresh perspective on the age-old debate about what can be forgiven in the name of genius.

1. Pinch, Natalie, and Bear all produce art—but for very different reasons. Which is the true artist?

2. Pinch spends years trying to emulate his father, and then, when that fails, trying to escape his father’s shadow. Do you think he ever succeeds?

3. Bear and Natalie are vastly different people. In what ways is Pinch like his father? How does he resemble his mother?

4. Bear is a larger-than-life character, and Pinch often fades into the background. In college, he befriends Marsden, another larger-than-life personality who has “styled himself a bohemian” (page 90). Why do you think Pinch wants to be friends with Marsden?

5. Throughout his life, Bear begins and ends several marriages, and has many children, but refuses to share his legacy with them. What do you think Bear owed his children? Do you think parents are obligated to pass down their earnings to their children?

6. When Pinch gives up painting, and then art history, he decides to teach Italian. Why do you think this was appealing to him?

7. After Pinch and Barrows break up, Pinch distances himself from romantic relationships. Even his marriage to Julie is short-lived and tepid. His relationship with Jing is perfunctory and polite. Do you think Bear’s incident with Barrows made it difficult for Pinch to get close to women?

8. Pinch often does not finish what he starts, and he struggles with self-worth throughout the novel. In what ways did his father hold him back? Or did Pinch get in his own way? Is a parent responsible for the mistakes of a child?

9. Despite his contentious relationship with his father, Pinch finds himself taking care of his father as he ages. How does this change their relationship? Have you had to care for an aging parent?

10. The Italian Teacher gives a reader a glimpse into the art world. Did anything surprise you about this business?

11. Bear often sucks the energy out of the room and disrupts lives in painful ways. He’s called a genius in artistic circles. To what extent does his talent excuse his behavior? Do you think Bear Bavinsky would be able to behave this way in the present time?

12. Pinch lives in many countries throughout the novel. He’s technically Canadian, but was born in Italy. He doesn’t have one place he considers home. How do you think this affected him? Why do you think Rachman chose this?

13. Well into adulthood, the nickname “Pinch” sticks. As the book progresses, people begin calling him Charles, but the nickname follows him throughout his life. How do you think this affected him, if at all?

Editorial Reviews

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2018 by The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Amazon.com, Instyle, Poets and Writers, Southern Living, Seattle Times, Chicago Review of Books, Newsday, The Boston Herald, and more

 
“Rachman is a brilliant choreographer of skewed desires . . . He has a deft way of describing atrocious behavior without damning his characters, without suggestions that they’re entirely circumscribed by their worst acts. His comedy is tempered by a kind of a gentleness that’s a salve in these mean times . . . An exotic touch of intrigue arises in THE ITALIAN TEACHER . . . Rachman brings his own, warmer touch to the crime, transforming it into a surprising act of defiance that’s both deliciously ironic and deeply affectionate.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Engaging and subtle . . . Rachman appears in perfect control of his material . . . engrossing, by turns gently humorous . . . The Italian Teacher is a psychologically nuanced pleasure." — New York Times Book Review

“A poignant, touching tale about living in the shadow of a brazen artistic genius. . . Unforgettable.” –USA Today

"Masterfully illustrates how malicious a father-son rivalry can be." — People

“The reliably excellent Rachman this time offers a nuanced, fascinating portrait of a celebrated painter looking ahead to his legacy.” – Entertainment Weekly
 
“Pencils down, brushes up: Rachman goes beyond the base coat with THE ITALIAN TEACHER, a portrait of a son his large-scale father.” – Vanity Fair

"In The Italian Teacher, Rachman manages to conjure a fresh perspective on fame and its destructive effects on the people ensnared by it. Instead of running toward celebrity, readers may find themselves instead turning around and running away." — Chicago Tribune

 
“Rachman wrestles with age-old questions: What is the purpose of art? How do we judge excellence? Does fame matter? . . . [THE ITALIAN TEACHER] moves with the energy and gusto of Bear. With Pinch/Charles, it broods and hopes and plumbs the depths. That’s a lot to expect of any novel, yet THE ITALIAN TEACHER delivers in spades.”—Dan Cryer, San Francisco Chronicle

“[THE ITALIAN TEACHER] takes satisfyingly unexpected turns, especially when the reader might expect a clichéd depiction of father-son strife. And Rachman offers a nuanced portrait of talented people whose lives don’t work out the way they had hoped.”—Newsday

“[An] artful page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
 
“A momentous drama of a volatile relationship and the fundamental will to survive.” —Booklist, starred review

“The Italian Teacher is a rich novel with a colorful cast of memorable characters.” —Hello Giggles

“Along with the skewering of art-world and academic pretensions, there is humor, humanity, and compassion in Rachman’s writing. For most fiction readers.” —Library Journal

"The Italian Teacher is a marvel—an entertaining, heartbreaking novel about art, family, loyalty, and authenticity. Tom Rachman is an enormously talented writer—this book is alive, from the first page to the last." —Tom Perotta, bestselling author of The Leftovers


Praise for Tom Rachman:

"[Rachman] writes perfectly and with a warm, twinkling-eyed generosity toward human behavior that does not get in the way of his pitiless observation of it." — Lorrie Moore, The New Yorker

"[The Imperfectionists is] so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off. I still haven't answered that question, nor do I know how someone so young could have acquired such a precocious grasp of human foibles. The novel is alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching, and it's assembled like a Rubik's Cube." —Christopher Buckley, The New York Times 

"Mr. Rachman's transition from journalism to fiction writing is nothing short of spectacular. The Imperfectionists is a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader's fun. The other half comes from his sparkling descriptions not only of newspaper office denizens but of the tricks of their trade, presented in language that is smartly satirical yet brimming with affection." —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

From the Publisher

Beginning in 2010 with his winning debut, The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman has channeled and championed lonely oddballs and misfits who feel marginalized, washed up, underachieving, or underappreciated. His first novel, a series of cunningly linked character studies, plumbed the disappointments and frustrations of the motley staff of a struggling English- language newspaper in Rome. His second, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (2014), was a more dizzyingly plotted quest for an absent father, but also rich in wit, charm, and empathy.

In The Italian Teacher, Rachman's sympathies once again lie with the quirky and the sidelined -- people who perk up like wilted plants when sprinkled with a few rehydrating droplets of kindness and connection. The book features a tight, propulsive narrative about a son growing up in the long shadow of his father, a famous -- and famously ill behaved -- painter. In lieu of the ink-stained wretches of journalism, where success is measured in scoops and front-page column inches, Rachman shifts his satirical eye to the high-end art market, where the arbiters of taste -- gallerists and critics -- remind artists that "popularity is a tan. It fades when out of the light." (The same motivational prod, of course, could be wielded to drive novelists.)

But The Italian Teacher is about more than art and commerce. At its core beats one of literature's perennial themes: the paternal ties that bind, sometimes to the point of choking. It is an issue that encompasses Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, as well as recent additions like Mark Sarvas's Memento Park and Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair (which features not one but two sons a generation apart, each sorting through his famous father's troubling legacy). But in the annals of warped father-son relationships, Rachman's novel deserves a special place for its ingenious form of filial retaliation.

The novel opens in 1955 in Rome, where five-year-old Charles "Pinch" Bavinsky lives with his young Canadian mother, Natalie, a dotty potter, and his famous, larger-than-life American father, Bear Bavinsky, "an oak of a man." The household dances around Bear, who puts in long hours painting his signature Life-Stills -- magnified close-ups of body parts. But the work has become an exercise in frustration, since he finds most of his new creations unworthy of his earlier masterpieces and destroys them before the paint has dried.

Pinch idolizes his father and feeds on any scraps of attention the great man throws his way. But within a few years, the seductive, overbearing Bear has moved back to New York with a new wife and family -- his fourth but by no means last -- leaving his sensitive son Pinch alone with his increasingly unhinged mother, who eventually relocates them to London.

The narrative, which spans sixty-three years -- right up to 2018 -- follows Pinch to college in Toronto in the early 1970s, back to London in the 1980s, and to a rustic, fly-infested cottage in France's Basque country, where Bear spends his summers and has stashed his unsold canvases. The habit of trying to curry favor with his self-absorbed father propels Pinch from his own stabs at painting to doctoral work in art history, before he falls back on his language skills and finds work teaching Italian -- a talent and identity completely separate from his father's. Along his mostly lonely route, he occasionally connects with fellow oddballs, including a ravenously ambitious girlfriend who belittles Pinch for acting "like a worshipful little boy around his father."

Rachman revels in his characters' lows -- and in tempting us into writing them off as losers. The lesson in his books is: Not so fast. Without giving away too much, I can say that Pinch stumbles into a secret, unexpected source of fulfillment and vindication, which he pursues over decades during holidays from his teaching job.

The Italian Teacher trots along at an engrossing clip, occasionally devolving into the ridiculous -- including an over-the-top scene with an injurious bookcase, perhaps a strained reference to E. M. Forster's famous death-by-bookcase scene in Howards End. A more bothersome misstep is Rachman's habit of baldly spelling out his characters' thoughts in italics, not trusting us to glean them if stated less directly.

Fortunately, he handles questions about art, craft, authenticity, identity, aesthetics, meaning, and value judgments with more subtlety. Bear pontificates to his son: "There's a gap always between what the object is and what the picture isn't. And that gap, Charlie, that's where the art is." Meanwhile, Natalie's pottery teacher argues, "A pot is either correct, or it is not. Whereas art is never quite good or bad. Art is simply a way of saying 'opinion.' " Pinch's gallery-going college friends observe that "artists used to strive for beauty. Now they all want to 'say something.' "p Rachman has great fun skewering tastemakers, including the "tin-eared typist" of an art critic whom Pinch courts to secure his father's legacy. This man writes pompously of Bear's "auratic resonance" and flags the "screaming irony" of the public's keen interest in what "the grizzled legend" was up to during his last decades. There's a screaming irony about his late work, all right, but -- as readers discover -- the fawning critic has missed it by a laughable mile.

Finally, let's not forget the novel's all-too-topical Heinous Genius question: Do brilliance and talent justify behaving badly? Bear Bavinsky is such a terrible father and infuriatingly selfish manipulator that readers will lose patience with him long before Pinch does. "The thing is, a nicer person, an easier person, would never have painted like that," he argues in his father's defense. Thanks in part to Pinch, his chosen but downtrodden son, Bear's appalling behavior is whitewashed in a deliciously subversive way that ends up serving the greater good, if not the truth. But the question takes on new resonance: Should exceptionally gifted people "get to live by different rules?" Rachman's response is exceptionally clever.

Heller McAlpin is a New York–based critic who reviews books for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

Reviewer: Heller McAlpin

The Barnes & Noble Review

…engaging and subtle…Rachman appears in perfect control of his material. This is not an aesthetic treatise but, first and foremost, a morality tale about fame and family, "the long, loud effect of fathers"…Pinch's middle years, and the middle of the book, are meandering and seemingly plotless, filled with sadness, disappointment and tenuously formed and lost connections. Yet the quiet story remains engrossing, by turns gently humorous and pathetic, mundane and poignant…There are no black-and-white answers in life and art, not even in our present age of increasing personal responsibility. The Italian Teacher is a psychologically nuanced pleasure.

The New York Times Book Review - Olga Grushin

★ 01/15/2018
In Rachman’s artful third page-turner (after The Rise & Fall of Great Powers), the son of a world-renowned painter struggles to escape the dark shadow cast by his father. Born in Rome to a mistress turned bride, Pinch Bavinsky only sees his domineering father, Bear, during the elder’s summer visits to Europe. After a trip by teenage Pinch to 1960s New York ends with Bear crushing his artistic ambitions, the son abandons his dreams of painting to embark on a failed career in academia before becoming a foreign language instructor in London. The most trusted of Bear’s 17 children, Pinch appoints himself overseer of his aging father’s work, and much of the novel’s well-staged tension emerges from Pinch’s choice in the early aughts to paint a reproduction of one of Bear’s paintings and sell it, passing it off as one of his father’s. Spanning the 1950s to the present, the novel does traffic a bit in familiar notions of the art world and difficult artists, but its subversion of these tropes makes for a satisfying examination of authorship and authenticity, and a fine fictionalization of how crafting an identity independent of one’s parents can be a lifelong, worthwhile project. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2017-12-24
In his poignant latest, Rachman (The Rise & Fall of Great Powers, 2014, etc.) examines a life dominated by someone else's art.Pinch worships his father, noted painter Bear Bavinsky, although Bear's behavior amply justifies the warning of Pinch's stepsister Birdie, daughter of the wife discarded for Pinch's mother, Natalie: "Everything's always about his art....He doesn't hardly care about his actual creations…the human ones." By the time Pinch is 15 in 1965, Bear has moved back to America from Italy and on to a third wife and more kids (eventual total: 17). Stuck in Rome with the increasingly unstable Natalie, Pinch desperately wants to stay connected to his elusive father. Rachman perfectly nails the charm with which Bear cloaks his selfishness and keeps his needy son both at a distance and firmly under his thumb. Bear skillfully deflects Pinch's plea to come live with him by saying it wouldn't be fair to Natalie and passes a devastating judgment on the boy's fledgling paintings: "You're not an artist. And you never will be." Pinch goes to college in Toronto, planning to become an art historian and write his father's biography, and it seems this will be the story of an impossible parent destroying a vulnerable offspring, especially after Bear sabotages Pinch's first serious love affair and Pinch winds up teaching Italian at a Berlitz-style language school in London. But the balance of power between them shifts over the years in Rachman's subtle rendering. Bear's reputation goes into eclipse, and he confides the unsold paintings in his remote French cottage to Pinch, whom he trusts to protect his legacy. The way Pinch claims some turf for himself while remaining entangled in Bear's shadow leads to an ironic conclusion that also shimmers with love and regret. Pinch's best friend and late-in-life lover, two of the novel's many finely rendered secondary characters, drink a rueful toast to a man who refused to be anyone's victim—except maybe his own.A sensitive look at complicated relationships that's especially notable for the fascinatingly conflicted protagonist.

Kirkus Review