Roman Holiday, With a Heroin Addict

I took Niccolo Ammantiti’s Me and You with me on the Amtrak train from Santa Fe to Chicago, and for several hours I resisted cracking the cover. I was worried that the novel would be really, I don’t know, Italian, and that its Italianness would detract from this singularly American experience I was having, which in those first hesitant hours mainly consisted of drinking Jim Beam in the café car. I’ve never visited Rome, but I’ve read Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, so I have an American-authored image of it burned into my brain, and it’s full of scooters and leather jackets and traffic circles and red-shingled rooftops and pigeons. I was afraid if I opened it I might miss an elk or a bald eagle.