THE MALTESE VERSION, by Katy Simpson Smith
About a third of the way through Katy Simpson Smith’s philosophical and disarmingly dishy new novel, one of its two heroines, Leonie, decides against having a one-night stand. She’s not going to “burrow” into some guy’s “psyche for the pleasure of the unknown.” Her reason? “Love wasn’t the same as not-knowing.”
Well, that’s refreshing, I thought, dog-earing the page. Leonie’s useful aphorism, a negative definition of love employing a double negative, was my first hint that the meringue-light surface of “The Maltese Version,” which had thus far presented itself as a caper about two female friends trying to make it in the dying travel-guide industry, might conceal unforeseen depths.
Smith is an observant and dexterous writer. Although there is certainly some satirical recycling of anodyne vibes à la recent artifacts like “Emily in Paris” and even “Bridgerton,” “The Maltese Version” is in fact a steely exploration of novelistic form and what said form can and cannot reveal. It’s a book that — for both its inventiveness and its many linguistic sleights of hand — can renew our faith in the playful joys and critical capacity of fiction.
The outlines of Smith’s plot are as follows: Leonie, a white woman in her 30s memorably described as possessing an “otter body,” is work wives with Rhoda, a Black woman in her 40s whose outwardly impeccable 20-year marriage to a businessman named Ike has begun to seem like a dead end.
The women toil diligently at Spinder’s Guides, a Chicago-based publisher whose overlords assign Western European tourist traps to Leonie, and to Rhoda all viable Caribbean islands. However, they begin to break out of their personal and professional typecasting when Leonie’s cagey boyfriend, Max, an up-and-coming literary translator, disappears to Malta.
The problem with Leonie and Max is that they can’t decide if they love each other. Their relationship is at once so tepid and so typical that anyone who has ever lived in proximity to young urban professionals in America will experience instant recognition. It’s not so much that the partnership is loveless, but that it seems to have become a sort of small business based on Leonie and Max’s shared interest in importing international languages and experiences.
When they fight, they fight about semantics. Did Max just say that he didn’t love Leonie’s mom? Did Leonie just define the word “love” incorrectly? Max’s relocation to a predictably sultry villa on Gozo, an island in the Maltese archipelago purported to be the site where the nymph Calypso trapped Odysseus, provokes a crisis.
Also predictably, this crisis is precipitated by the statuesque charms of Ana, a Maltese poet whose verses on eroticism, loss and female rage have gone viral. Milquetoast Max can’t translate Ana without getting pretty intimate. Real sex transpires. Unforeseen uses are found for a lemon.
Back in Chicago, a desperate Leonie persuades Rhoda to use her pull as the magazine’s resident “island queen” — an epithet Rhoda does not allow to pass without comment — to land an assignment in Malta. Max isn’t picking up his phone, and Rhoda is tired of her role as primary caregiver for her 10-year-old son and all-purpose assistant to the work-addicted if hunky Ike.
The first crisis, of an unimaginative translator cheating on his girlfriend as a way of getting ahead professionally, is amusingly compounded by the arrival of Rhoda, who wants not only to skewer Max but also to live out her own narrative fantasies, believability be damned.
Since Henry James if not before, naïve American protagonists have been sent overseas to work out their issues. If back home is a place “where you can’t get by without mimicking good cheer,” as Max thinks, then Malta is, like Ana, all “introversion and mild hostility.”
The country’s political history — the “corruption, the Mob-like morality of this handful of ancient families … Malta as fiefdom, Malta as crossroads” — seeps into Smith’s descriptions. The island is a “dinosaur land” that is “crumbling into the sea,” characterized by “carceral” architecture. By contrast, Leonie and Max are people who seem not to have experienced history at all. A major quandary in Leonie’s life in Chicago is whether to wear pink socks or white.
The atavistic desire, and the reverberations of violence past and present, that appear to hold sway in Malta cannot, it turns out, be expressed via Max’s “sanitized this-is-that” transposition. The novel’s resident translator feels a dangerous combination of sexual longing for and jealousy of Ana’s native tongue, or what he confusedly perceives as “the luxury of possessing the source language.” But translation can never be an act of ownership; it’s the writing of a “second story,” as a wiser and more independent Leonie will come to realize near the novel’s close.
That is to say that Ana and Max’s literary and erotic jousting provides a fortuitous backdrop for Rhoda and Leonie’s own quests, for a new language with which to translate their secret inner lives — and their provisional, possibly imperfect definitions of love — into conscious thought and, they fervently hope, action. Love might be a three-stage process of terror, comfort, then separation; it might be two lovers “shouting to each other through the trees.” It might happen in words, but then again, and most deliciously, maybe not.
THE MALTESE VERSION | By Katy Simpson Smith | FSG Originals | 305 pp. | Paperback, $19
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