This terse, unsparing novel can be summed up thus: after nearly a decade’s absence, the successful designer Gabriele Bilancini returns home to suburban Rome, where he wrestles with an identity crisis. His family and friends – his intimates before he moved to Milan and raced up the social ladder – feel like shameful reminders of his proletarian origins, which he keeps hidden – in ‘the way you hide a sin’ –  from the Milanese élite he is anxious to fit in with.

In Milan, where he works and lives with his girlfriend Camilla, the daughter of his mentor, the celebrity designer Franco Zardi, Gabriele dresses smartly, limits lunch to ‘a salad with full protein’ and purges his speech of any signs of his unsophisticated upbringing. But during his long-postponed visit to his family home – described by Gabriele as ‘an ode to good things in bad taste’ – he drops the act and the starched shirts, switches to Romanesco, hits the usual bar with old friends and is fed a ‘full board’ three times a day by his doting mother.

Gabriele is torn between nostalgia for the places and people of his childhood and disgust for his friends’ ‘reiteration of the same life without wanting anything else’, to which he too would have been condemned had he stayed in Rome. Just as his origins make him an outsider in the city that’s enabled his success, so his success makes him an outsider in the world that’s shaped his origins.

Gabriele’s family have ‘turned into a bunch of cockroaches before his eyes’. His good fortune is reflected back to him time and again. In comparison, his low-earning friends are hard-up ‘failures’, most of their conversations being repetitions of the same put-down with slight variations: Gabriele thinks that ‘there’s more to life than success and money’; his friends that it is a privilege to think so.

This story of a fractured home-coming tackles head-on the way we live now. Gabriele embodies a recognisably modern middle-class type who, in pursuing his self-regarding ambitions, sacrifices true human connections, parrots fashionable views, subscribes to substanceless etiquette and forfeits the primary ingredients of a meaningful life. The book offers a literary response to today’s digital skimming. Sentences are periodically isolated on individual lines, caption-like, as though written to be thumbed through on a commuter train. With each page a screenful, thisis truly a novel of our times.