Whereabouts

Composed of short, journal-like chapters named for locations, the novel follows an unnamed middle-aged woman through the streets, rooms, and routines of an unnamed Italian city as she moves through roughly a year of solitary life, gradually arriving at the decision to leave.

The narrator, a professor who lives alone, introduces her daily world through small, closely observed encounters. Each morning she passes a sidewalk memorial for a man who died at forty-four, his mother's handwritten note thanking passersby. In her neighborhood she frequently runs into a man she might once have been involved with, who now lives with a friend of hers and has two children. Their encounters are warm but chaste: a lingering chat, a moment on a bridge watching pedestrians' shadows against a wall. Both understand they could pursue something reckless but do not. At work, the narrator occupies the office of a poet who died two years ago. She finds the space alienating and her teaching uninspiring. She eats lunch alone at a nearby trattoria, where she watches a recently separated father plead with his ten-year-old girl to stay at his house, the girl remaining loyal to her mother after her father's affair was discovered.

Spring distresses the narrator because every significant blow in her life has fallen in that season. She meets periodically with the teenage daughter of friends, a sixteen-year-old who chose to stay in the city alone rather than return abroad with her father, stepmother, and stepbrother. The girl calls the narrator "a strong woman, independent" (16), unaware of the narrator's deep ambivalence about her own solitude.

At a bookstore, the narrator encounters her only significant ex-boyfriend, a handsome but immature man she was with for five years. She had cooked for him, nursed him, and assumed he would propose. Then one April, another woman rang her buzzer: a second lover who had discovered the narrator's existence through a doctor's receipt tucked inside a borrowed book. The two women compared their parallel relationships in a "long and harrowing conversation" (23). Though devastated, the narrator felt as though she were "finally coming up for air" (24).

Solitude, the narrator reflects, has become her "trade" (25). She traces her fraught relationship with aloneness to her mother, who has always feared being alone and once kept the narrator fused to her side as a shield against that terror. The narrator eventually broke away, but the gulf between them persists.

Through the seasons, her inner life unfolds in fleeting encounters. At a museum, she watches a foreign woman lie down and fall asleep on a bench in a painted garden room, inhabiting the space with an ease the narrator envies. She recalls a year of therapy in which she recounted her mother's rages and her father's sudden death when she was fifteen: a fever the night before a planned birthday trip to see a play across the border, bacteria in his bloodstream, a wake in place of the theater. Her traveling friend, a harried working mother, visits the narrator's apartment as a refuge and produces a notebook written by her younger daughter, a story about a girl who feels lonely because her mother is almost never home. She asks the narrator to keep the notebook hidden from her husband.

The narrator swims twice a week, finding meditative relief in the water. In the locker room, women share stories of suffering that leave her saturated with dread. On the street one afternoon, she spots the man from the bridge arguing bitterly with his wife. The quarrel reveals deeper marital strain, though its immediate cause is uncomfortable new shoes.

At a three-day academic conference, the narrator finds consolation in a quiet philosopher in the neighboring hotel room, a well-known refugee scholar with large, tender eyes. Without exchanging more than courteous good-nights, their tacit bond puts her at peace. She buys theater tickets at a historic venue, remembering her father, a post-office worker who first introduced her to the stage. At a dinner party, she loses her temper with a woman who interrupts her repeatedly, tells the woman she has "no idea what the fuck" (79) she is talking about, then walks home mortified.

She traces her anxious relationship with money to her parents: Her frugal father counted every coin, and her mother once shamed her for wanting a frilly white dress as a child. Even as an adult, the narrator feels paralyzed before small purchases. In August, the city empties. A young neighbor sells his deceased parents' possessions from folding tables in an alleyway, and the narrator buys drinking glasses, a necklace, an old magazine, and an unfinished portrait of a girl. These orphaned objects transform her spartan apartment and keep her company.

At year's end, the narrator accompanies the man from the bridge and his two children on a day trip to a castle, standing in for his wife. In a sheltered courtyard in a hilltop town, he turns to her and says "Stunning" (113), a word that burns inside her though she cannot tell if he means her or the place. She visits her beloved stationery store for her annual agenda purchase and finds it replaced by a luggage shop; the family who ran it is gone.

She begins thinking about the man too often. But when he calls, it is because her friend's father has had a stroke and the family needs someone to walk their dog. Alone in their apartment for the first time, the narrator observes the architecture of family life and recognizes "an ingenious organism, an impenetrable collective" (125) she is not part of. Walking the dog daily through a nearby villa, she feels the routine pulling her away from her infatuation until it loosens its hold.

At her coffee bar, she tells the barista she has received a year-long fellowship abroad. In the newspaper she spots a photograph of the philosopher from the conference and reads that he has died after a long illness.

The narrator takes the train to visit her elderly mother, who lives alone above a pharmacy in a small town. She tells her mother about the move. Her mother responds calmly, then delivers a quiet monologue about how every move causes you to lose something: a brooch, an address book, a photograph of the narrator's father as a young man. Even lost things, her mother concludes, continue to exist somewhere.

The narrator deep-cleans her apartment, wanting to "remove every trace" (140) of herself. Her suitcases, purchased at the luggage shop that replaced her stationery store, are packed. She visits her father's crypt and addresses him directly, recalling his emotional withdrawal, his refusal to intervene between mother and daughter, and his sudden death. She confesses she mourned the wasted theater tickets more than she mourned him. On her last day, walking through the piazza, she spots a woman dressed almost identically to herself and follows this double until the figure rounds a curve and vanishes. The sighting clarifies something: She is herself and also someone else, leaving and also staying. In a brief, essayistic passage titled "Nowhere," she reflects that she has always been in motion, and that the words for disorientation are her "abode, my only foothold" (151).

On the train toward the border, she shares a compartment with five warm, exuberant travelers who speak an unfamiliar language, share food, and sing along to music on a phone. They offer her walnuts, figs, and blood oranges, but she declines, having already eaten a tasteless sandwich. They exit at a stop, cheerfully reciting their practiced Italian farewell, and leave the compartment spotless. The narrator remains with her book and her lightly packed suitcase, regretting she did not accept "even a morsel of their lavish meal" (155), as the train carries her onward.