By Maria Bregman
Not long ago, I watched a celebrated academic, a man whose books had once reshaped his field, struggle to share his screen on Zoom. For five excruciating minutes, he clicked and fumbled, his intellectual authority draining away with every apologetic murmur, whilst a twenty-something technician offered advice in the patient, slightly condescending tone one uses for a toddler. In that small, technological humiliation, I saw the ghost of a future that haunts the modern professional: the creeping terror of obsolescence.
This is the phantom that stalks every page of Domenico Starnone’s slim, brutal novel, Trick. It arrives masquerading as a sentimental Italian family drama: an ageing artist, a visit to his daughter, a grudging weekend spent babysitting his four-year-old grandson. It has been hailed as an honest, touching portrait of imperfect people and the messy reality of family life. This is, to put it mildly, a misdiagnosis. Trick is not a heartwarming tale about finding connection in the twilight of one’s years. It is a terrifyingly precise economic horror story about the indignity of work in a world that no longer values you.
Our protagonist is Daniele Mallarico, an illustrator in his seventies, once renowned, now fading. His wife is dead, his health is failing, and his career is circling the drain. His melancholic solitude is interrupted by an imperious summons from his daughter, Bettina. She needs him to look after her son, Mario, for three days. She is exhausted, her marriage is frayed, and she has a conference to attend. Daniele, trapped, acquiesces.
He arrives at her Naples apartment to find a perfect diorama of domestic exhaustion. The flat, where the novel’s action is almost entirely confined, is not a home; it is a pressure cooker. Bettina is brittle with irritation, her husband is a weary ghost, and their life is a fortress built against the intrusion of ‘peace or happiness’. This is the stage. But the drama that unfolds is not the one we expect.
A Crayon in the Engine
The central conflict is not, as a sentimental reading would suggest, Daniele’s struggle to connect with his grandson. The boy, Mario, is less a character and more of a narrative obstacle, a chaotic force that threatens the one thing Daniele truly cares about: finishing a job. He has a commission to illustrate a collection of stories for a young, ‘trendy’, and impertinent new publisher. The pay is derisory, but the stakes are existential. This isn’t just a job; it is a desperate attempt to prove his continued professional viability, his relevance in a world that has all but forgotten him.
Starnone has explored this friction before. In his devastating novel Via Gemito, the artist-patriarch feels his creative spirit crushed by the mere presence of a pram in the hallway. But in Trick, the analysis is sharper, colder. Mario’s childish demands are not an obstacle to Art with a capital A; they are an obstacle to Labour with a capital L. Daniele is not a tortured genius wrestling with his muse. He is a freelancer on a deadline, trapped in an impromptu crèche, his concentration shattered by a small boy who represents the unpaid, unbidden, and deeply inconvenient labour of family life.
He is caught between two impossible jobs: the unpaid care work demanded by his daughter and the underpaid creative work demanded by the market. This is not a novel about the soul. It is a novel about the gig economy.
Of course, one could argue that this is simply a touching story about a man slowly, grudgingly rediscovering his heart. A testament to the enduring, if messy, bonds of family. Look, the defenders of this reading will say, at the scene where Daniele tries to comfort his despairing daughter. He showers her with compliments, a ‘tactic’ he has used since she was a child. ‘You’re more beautiful than any film star’, he insists. She retorts, ‘I’m a fat, old psychopath’.
A nice moment.
Except it isn’t. Starnone, with surgical precision, calls it a ‘tactic’. This is not a spontaneous outpouring of love; it is a calculated manoeuvre, a cheap trick to manage a difficult situation. It is the emotional equivalent of giving a crying child a sweet. It works, for a moment, but it solves nothing. To see this as a sign of Daniele’s redemption is to be wilfully blind to the novel’s cynicism. He is not learning to love; he is learning to cope, using the worn-out tools at his disposal.
The Final, Underpaid Commission
The real engine of Daniele’s despair is his relationship with the modern world of work, embodied by his arrogant young client. His precarious position is not merely a product of his age; it is a product of a systemic devaluation of his craft. He is, to offer a wildcard analogy, a piece of beautifully coded legacy software trying to run on a new operating system that finds it clunky, inefficient, and largely incompatible. His years of experience, his refined skills, his artistic integrity – these are no longer assets. They are liabilities in a market that prizes speed, novelty, and, above all, cheapness.
His struggle is the struggle of an entire generation of creative professionals whose life’s work has been rendered insecure by technological disruption and the relentless logic of late capitalism. His body is failing him, his eyesight is blurry, his hand is unsteady. These are not just metaphors for old age; they are the literal, physical impediments to his ability to earn a living. He is a craftsman whose tools are breaking.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but Bettina’s misery feels less like a feminist tragedy and more like the predictable burnout of a dual-income household that cannot afford adequate childcare or emotional space. Her life of ‘no peace, no happiness’ is the direct result of a socio-economic system that promises everything and delivers exhaustion. She and her father are not just bound by blood; they are bound by the shared experience of being crushed by systems they cannot control. They are both just trying to get through the day.
The novel’s title is a masterstroke of ambiguity. Is the ‘trick’ the prank Mario plays on his grandfather, which precipitates the story’s crisis? Is it the ‘tactic’ Daniele uses on his daughter? Or is it something larger? The final conversation of the book, where a friend asks for advice on how to live, and Daniele offers a rambling, desperate prescription – ‘a little pharmacology, a little sociology… a little art… a vegetarian diet, an English course’ – is the key. It is the advice of a man who knows there is no single answer. The system is rigged. The game is unwinnable. The only thing to do is to try every trick in the book just to stay afloat.
This is the cruelest joke of all. The punchline is that a lifetime of dedication, of honing a craft, of building a reputation, can be erased in a moment. It can leave you old, sick, and scrambling for a badly paid commission from a boy who doesn’t respect you, whilst being forced to look after a child you barely know. The trick is the promise that hard work and talent will lead to a life of dignity and security. In Starnone’s cold, clear-eyed vision, that promise is the most elaborate, and most vicious, lie of all.
