The Brooklyn Rail

In the opening lines of Juliet Grames’s sophomore novel, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia, the narrator, Francesca Loftfield, writes, “Growing up meant understanding who was at fault wasn’t what mattered; what mattered was who had to pay the consequences.” It’s a strange thesis for a mystery, but as I moved through the novel—which, like Grames’s best-selling debut, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, is set in a richly described Calabria, Italy—I began to understand that Grames is less concerned with “whodunnit” than “to whom was it done?”, in more ways than one.

The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia, presented as an account remembered by a much older Francesca, centers on events that happen to the Italian American decades earlier, when she is twenty-seven years old. Naïve and idealistic, though not without her own shadows, Francesca arrives in 1960 at the remote Aspromonte mountain town of Santa Chionia to open a nursery school on behalf of a non-profit organization. Following devastating floods, an unidentified skeleton is unearthed in town, and, after an elderly housekeeper pleads for her help, Francesca takes it upon herself to figure out if the skeleton might be that of the housekeeper’s lost son. Her investigation is looked upon unkindly by some of the other townsfolk though, and she begins to suspect there might be some kind of organized crime syndicate at work behind the scenes.

It becomes clear rather quickly that Francesca is not quite Sherlock Holmes: as an American woman with American ideals, she is stubborn and sometimes naïve in her quest for the truth, often pushing straightforwardly ahead when situations require tact and cultural sensitivity, seemingly oblivious to her blunders until it’s too late, or sometimes too full of American righteousness to care. She acts as our proxy—it’s through her eyes we witness both the magic of Santa Chionia and its more menacing and “backward” qualities. Much is made of her outsiderness—despite her own Calabrian heritage, she is reminded by several townsfolk that she does not understand their ways and that her meddling is not welcome. And yet, it is her outsiderness that allows her to go digging where no other woman would dare in a town ruled by patriarchy. This paradox creates a tense atmosphere, one where events often feel inscrutable yet ominous, even as Francesca believes she’s closer to the truth. As the novel progressed, I couldn’t shake the nagging sense that the townsfolk all knew more than they were letting on, and that Francesca’s understanding of things was not entirely to be relied upon.

Unlike your standard mystery novel, it’s the identity of the skeleton that becomes the central mystery, with the question of whom the murderer might be taking a backseat—after all, it’s hard to theorize a murderer’s motive if you don’t know who the victim is. And, in fact, we quickly learn that the skeleton might belong to any number of the town’s “lost boys”—men who supposedly emigrated to the United States and were never heard from again. A run-of-the-mill mystery might trot out possible candidates and their stories dutifully, inviting the reader to theorize what has happened while racing towards an inevitable conclusion. And while that was undoubtedly part of my experience, I found, quickly, that the questions surrounding these men’s disappearances—recounted by the bewildered and bereaving women they left behind—complicated what I wanted from the book. Even if we learned who the skeleton belonged to, I thought, would it be satisfactory when so many other men were still missing?

This is part of what I appreciated most about this novel. Despite the mystery driving it, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is also historical literary fiction—it is, at its heart, concerned with not just the individuals depicted in the fictional Santa Chionia, but also with the very real fates of mountain towns throughout the Aspromonte region. As someone who knew very little about the history and politics surrounding mid-century Italy, I learned much about the policies that led to the impoverishment and abandonment of these towns and the marginalization of their people: environmental laws that made it impossible for shepherds to continue grazing their goats; the withholding of emergency funds meant to rebuild these towns after natural disasters; the unrealized “promises” by the Italian government that if residents relocated from the towns into temporary shelters, they would be put into new houses. Without being pedantic, Grames draws a clear line between these policies and the rise of organized crime and emigration: with no other jobs or resources to turn to (many of these men were illiterate and had little education), the men of Aspromonte either had to resort to illegal tactics to survive or find better opportunities elsewhere. And while the “lost boys” described in Santa Chionia are fictional, I understood that Grames was trying to bear witness on behalf of the countless real emigrants who disappeared—either because they died abroad or were illiterate and could not write home or any number of other reasons.

With all this history packed into the book, Grames nonetheless manages to pull off a complex, page-turning mystery that begs for a second reading. At first glance, one might be tempted to find the ending predictable, if satisfying. If we believe Francesca and her sleuthing, then we believe we understand what has happened; we believe her theory on who was murdered, by whom, and why; we believe that when she shares her theory with the supposed victim’s family, she is telling them something they don’t already know. But we would be myopic to forget that Francesca is an outsider, with an outsider’s view of things. If, instead, we are careful to consider the words of those from the region, then another understanding of the novel’s events emerges. In the book’s last pages, Grames cleverly turns the mystery on its head, leaving us with one final mystery to puzzle out. It’s not just for the sake of being clever—this final mystery forces us to consider whose stories we pay attention to, whose stories are deemed important—but it is also great fun that rewards a careful and curious reader.

At the climax of the novel, Francesca reconsiders the decisions that have led her to that point by revisiting the opening lines of the novel: “Growing up is realizing it doesn’t matter whose fault something is, my father used to tell me. It matters who has to pay the consequences.” Although Francesca is musing upon this in the context of her own concerns, it’s clear by this point that Francesca is not the only person who has fallen victim to forces more powerful than her, and that in fact, the book is asking us to pull back with a wider lens and consider injustices greater than the murder of one individual.

Who has to pay the consequences of what has happened to the ghost towns of the Aspromonte? The lost boys who toiled namelessly in a new world? The men sucked into dangerous lives of organized crime? The women who were left behind, who shaped things behind the scenes, who history has just as easily forgotten? Their future generations who have lost ties to their homelands and traditions?

Of course, I think it is important to understand why the people of the Aspromonte have been made to suffer—but, the novel tells me, “Finding a culpable party doesn’t fix a problem.” For the people of the Aspromonte—their towns abandoned into the annals of history—who or what caused their situation cannot bring back what has been lost. What matters is who they were, and are. What matters is not letting all of that be lost too, and The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is one spellbinding and smartly crafted homage to their stories.