The Italian Teacher

Description

“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.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 TimesTom 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.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?

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.
 

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7700 × 5.2900 × 7.9600 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780735222700
ISBN-10	0735222703
Author	Tom Rachman
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC044000, FIC045000
Subjects	fiction books, painting, modern art, great artists, toronto, Art books, literary fiction, art studio, books for women, book club recommendations, gifts for her, rome, women gifts, realistic fiction books, good books for women, best selling books for women, italian gifts, father and son, father son gifts, father and son gifts, tom rachman, novels, women, london, family, parents, Italy, FIC045000, fiction, father, son, FIC044000, Literature, books about artists, art, women's fiction, gifts for women, historical fiction, teachers, artists, art history, 1950s