Gino is one of those troubled young men who might be called wayward, but that implies he’s strayed from a path he can see, when it would be more accurate to say he’s way-free, adrift, rudderless. In his early 20s, he returns home to the Abruzzo region of Italy. At loose ends, and spurred on by the laconic, accomplished father he resents and can’t impress, Gino seeks out a childhood friend, Franca, who as a little girl new to the town announced to Gino that someday they would be married. It’s as though she’s been waiting for him. Immediately, in a way that seems simultaneously improbable and inevitable, they fall in love and marry. Franca gets pregnant. They move into a remote, lovely house. But Gino—fragile, self-doubting, distrustful of anything that feels like good fortune since how could he deserve it—begins to deteriorate when their son is born. The baby, Elio, is extraordinarily beautiful; everyone remarks on it, and as his legend grows, people start showing up at the house—eventually by the busload—to catch a glimpse of him. What could be the source of this beauty, Gino wonders. Surely not himself. He fixates on the married lover Franca had before Gino’s return, an unpleasant and possibly Mafia-connected concrete contractor, begins stalking him, and the family idyll ends soon and badly. The prolific and versatile Thomson here offers a low-key, somber, sometimes lyrical novel about ordinary people. It’s not densely plotted, not filled with large-scale twists; the novelist relies instead on meticulous detail, on compelling portraiture. The result is a slow-motion psychological train wreck of a book. We watch things unravel in just the way that’s been foretold, and we feel surprised despite ourselves.