who begins a relationship with Roger Cruikshank, an office executive and aspiring writer. While Roger superficially resembles the heroes of the romance novels Anna reads, his selfish and cruel nature reveals itself when Anna becomes pregnant and Roger deserts her. The novel opens with Anna stabbing Roger to death. The reasons behind the murder are then explored through Roger's prosaic diary entries and Anna's interpretations of them. In Parks's next two novels, epistolary formats take the place of first-person narrators, providing the author with the opportunity to use multiple voices.Home Thoughts (1987) centers on Julia Delaforce, who leaves her job in London to teach English as a second language in Verona. Having fled an affair with a married man, she exchanges letters with him and writes of him in her letters to others. Julia quickly loses her new job, leaving her among a group of unhappy British expatriates in a milieu of temporary jobs and shallow friendships. Letters between characters are again used to provide multiple points of view in Family Planning (1989). The story follows the Baldwin family, consisting of the parents and their four grown children. Each family member selfishly denies his or her responsibility to Raymond, their schizophrenic older brother. After their father runs away to Algeria and their mother is beset with insanity, the Baldwins begin a back-and-forth correspondence, arguing over family assets and blaming each other for the problems of their family. Parks's next novel, Cara Massimina (1990), is a comic thriller in which Morris Duckworth, an English teacher, devises a plot to advance socially when he meets a wealthy young woman named Massimina, nicknamed Mimi. Jealous of her family’s wealth and social standing, Duckworth decides to kidnap Mimi and ransom her to her parents. He begins travelling around Italy with the unwitting Mimi, leaving her briefly to return home to assist Mimi’s family and the police in their investigation. Morris begins to fall in love with Mimi, but when she sees a television report about her abduction, he is forced to kill her and dump her body into the sea. The novel's darkly comedic tone continues in its sequel, Mimi's Ghost (1995), which finds Morris marrying Mimi's sister and becoming part of their family's wine business. However, Morris is frequently visited by the ghost of Mimi, who speaks to him through his cellular phone and acts as his spiritual advisor. In Goodness (1991), protagonist George Crawley struggles to deal with the birth of a severely handicapped daughter. When unsuccessful surgery further complicates his daughter's condition, Crawley must cope with the moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding a life that is no longer happy or fulfilling. The psychological thriller Shear centers on geologist Peter Nicholson, who takes his mistress on a working vacation to a Mediterranean island. Once he arrives on the island, Peter's life quickly becomes complicated—the widow of a quarry worker arrives, plotting revenge for her husband's suspected murder; Peter has an affair with his translator, whose father is trying to control the emerging murder conspiracy; and Peter's wife informs him that she's pregnant, while threatening to have an abortion if he fails to respond positively to the news. Italian Neighbors is a nonfiction work about Parks's time living in continental Europe, in which he views his own neighborhood as an eccentric community and describes Italy as a land of paradoxes. The memoir's sequel, An Italian Education: The Further Adventures of an Expatriate in Verona (1995), continues Parks's exploration of his adopted land, discussing his eventual feelings of acceptance and further involvement in Italy's day-to-day life. In the novel Europa, Parks returns to the subject of teaching English as a second language. Framed by the interior monologue of forty-five-year-old teacher Jerry Marlowe, Europa follows Jerry and his fellow teachers as they travel to the European Parliament at Strasbourg to protest discriminatory working conditions. (They believe Italian schools give preferential treatment to teachers who are Italian.) Jerry, however, is more interested in his former mistress than his employment situation, and spends the rest of the novel obsessing about her. Destiny (2000) is also structured around an interior monologue. The narrator is Christopher Burton, a famous writer, who, while staying at a hotel in London, learns that his schizophrenic son has committed suicide. The death of Burton's son provides him with the opportunity to finally put distance between himself and his aristocratic Italian wife. The novel follows Burton over a three-day period as he makes a difficult journey from Heathrow to Turin to retrieve his son's body, then on to Rome, where the funeral will be held. During this time, the reader has access to Burton's troubled mind as he reflects on his marriage, the lives of his adopted son and daughter, and his career. Parks has also released a collection of essays, Adultery and Other Diversions (1999), consisting of thirteen pieces, the first and last of which focus on the subject of adultery. The other essays revolve around Parks's various recollections of journeying by car, his father's death, memories of ghosts, and living in Europe. In addition to his prose, Parks has also produced several translations of Italian-language works, including novels by Calvino and Fleur Jaeggy, and Robert Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

Critical Reception

Reviewers have found Parks to be both an adept and an entertaining commentator on the flawed nature of relationships. Parks confronts his often ordinary characters with challenging situations and examines how their responses are shaped by environment and experience. With his first novel Tongues of Flame, Parks caught the attention of critics, who praised his concise and clear prose. In particular, the exorcism at the novel's climax was praised for offering a surprising twist to the usual coming-of-age story. Critics continued to applaud Parks’s technical mastery in his subsequent works, calling his writing both comic and ambiguous. Impressed with the multiplicity of viewpoints afforded by Parks's epistolary technique, reviewers have responded positively to the increasing range of voices presented in his work. While the prose in Parks's early works was appreciated for its clarity, his later works—most notably Destiny—have received mixed reviews for their disjointed, paratactic style.