Katie Simpson Smith's tales of Rome

The Everlasting by Katie Simpson Smith tells four stories of Rome, set at four very different times in the Common Era. In 2015, an American microbiologist conducting research and running from a failing marriage falls for a stranger after an accidental meeting. In 1559, a princess in the Medici family falls in love with her portraitist and finds her fierce intelligence and independence in tension with the severe restrictions of her sex. In 896, a monk who spends his days watching over the decomposing bodies in the monastery’s crypt tries to come to terms with his guilt over loving another man and develops a fatherly affection for a young novitiate. In 165, a 12-year-old girl struggles to understand what it means to be a woman while establishing her Christian faith.

Smith’s prose is passionate and a little wild, like her characters. Other readers might prefer tighter editing, but I loved the energy of these stories, which created a propulsion to the narrative that didn’t require rushing. The result is a novel that feels both lush – there’s a sustained attention to each scene that allows a reader to feel immersed – and dynamic.

Smith, who holds a PhD in History, has a special gift for bringing the past to life, and Rome, with its layers of history visibly stacked on each other, is the perfect setting for the novel’s explorations. Smith writes about Rome, both modern and ancient, with remarkable authority. Satan, the fallen angel himself, serves as a sort of omniscient interlocutor throughout the book, appearing in frequent bracketed asides to urge the stories’ deeper contemplations. He has this to say about The Eternal City:

“This is the city for hustle, for building permanent tokens of human transience, and then building on top of those. No one is remembered except the pulsing city itself, which – sack after sack – refuses to parish. Do you know about the floods that washed over this field you call a market, and Nero’s fire that set the dancers’ feet alight, and the quake that cracked the windows in St. John Lateran... and worst of all, when in 2016 this sacred marble assembly begins drowning in the dung of one million goddamn starlings? Above their waste, another layer of tile – shh – until the city climbs so high the rising seas will bring it refugees in droves, and God will have to ask Himself: Is this a shrine to me, or another Babel?”

This investigation of Rome as a place of constant reinvention, at once a Paradise, grave, city, and wilderness, to cite Shelley from the epigraph, allowed the four stories to cohere, more than any common theme of love or oppression, although those threads also snaked through each era.

I admit to some discomfort around the 16th-century story of Giulia, who was both a privileged Medici and an outcast because – her African grandmother having been raped by a pope – her skin was “darker than was considered pale”. Guilia is portrayed as a fierce woman from her opening paragraph, when she’s alone in her bedroom, unpacking at a vacation villa, while imagining herself in battle: stabbing and decapitating her enemies, swinging corpses by their ankles, tossing children out the window by their hair. These sorts of fantasies persist, and while they could feel like the ideation of a woman chafing at her societal restrictions, they seemed to edge into the trope of the noble African warrior, righteously savage, bloodthirsty, and furious. Toward the end of her story, Guilia says it directly to her lover: “I’m a warrior…. Built for battle.” Already squirming, I was struck by this sentence: “[The painter] smelled of slightly of sulphur – or was it the pigment used to make yellow, to turn her skin from white to leonine.” Smith’s use of the word “leonine” to describe Guilia’s skin color is an unfortunate choice; it falls into a second trope, of describing black people as animals, while reinforcing the first, since the warrior, though righteous, behaves with animalistic savagery.

Descriptions of The Everlasting remark that it’s about love, and while that’s not wrong, I think it’s misleading. In the end, what interested me most was not the contemplation of earthly love, but of the divine kind. The 165 CE section on Prisca, based on the martyrdom story of an actual saint, surprised me in its sensitivity and its success in making plausible the details of her heartbreaking but implausible story. The Wikipedia entry on Saint Prisca notes that “According to Catholic theologian Johann Kirsch, extant narratives are unhistorical and their details impossible.” It seems natural to feel skeptical of the claim of a child martyr, but Smith’s Saint Prisca is not a historical misunderstanding. She suffered what the “extant narratives” say she suffered, and she deserves the title, but at the same time, she is every bit a 12-year-old. In Prisca’s final days, and in much of the rest of the novel, Smith’s sympathetic imagination worked to make her characters, both ancient and modern, come alive.