Skinned alive

The people I know who quit smoking have begun smoking again. « I will stop, » each says, « once the pandemic, inflation, energy austerity, and threats of nuclear war settle down. » The four o’clock doomscroll with a glass of wine, a newfound obsession with fitness (the treadmill allows you to flee eternally), listlessness, insomnia, nail chewing, new nervous tics: the contemporary anxious person is the progeny of a famous neurotic who is just turning hundred. His name is Zeno Cosini, the chain-smoking protagonist of Italo Svevo’s cult novel Zeno’s Conscience (1923), and he is bad at life because modernity makes people bad at it.

Imagine if your therapist, as the next crucial phase of your treatment, assigned you to write your autobiography, which you did diligently, and after which you decided you were cured and thus ended your treatment, which angered your therapist and caused him to publish your autobiography as revenge. This is the frame story of Zeno’s Conscience, prefaced by the fictional Dr. S, a tell-me-about-your-mother type who has had the gall to make public his patient’s private history. « I am the doctor occasionally mentioned in this story, in unflattering terms, » he begins. « Anyone familiar with psychoanalysis knows how to assess the patient’s obvious hostility toward me. » Zeno has dumped his shrink, « suspended treatment just when things were going well, » the woundable Dr. S laments, « denying me the fruit of my long and painstaking analysis of these memories. » But the doctor is a reasonable man. He writes, « I want him to know, however, that I am prepared to share with him the lavish profits I expect to make from this publication, on condition that he resume his treatment. » Zeno transforms from patient to hostage.

The book lampoons the often ludicrous theories and treatments proposed by a burgeoning field, but it also concedes that the new science was essential to address the mental struggles of an increasingly twitchy populace. The novel laughs, though its laugh is nervous. Every generation has to mock its own attempts to address the unaddressable. The problems are real, and people are so desperate that they will take — and always have taken — extreme, sometimes ridiculous measures to feel at home in their own bodies and psyches. Wearing a grin, Svevo’s novel pokes its finger right in the wound.