In an illustrative anecdote early in this study of Italy and the Italians, Tim Parks recalls how the representative of a courier company in Verona once told him that a package could not be picked up from him for forty-eight hours because they were too busy. The reason they were too busy was because they were so fast. “It seems pointless arguing with such logic”, writes Parks, and so instead, in An Italian Education, he has tried to explain it.

Parks, a self-confessed “frigid Anglo-Saxon”, has lived in Italy since 1981, working as a novelist, translator and teacher. He is married to an Italian woman and they have a son and two young daughters. Seeing his children in an environment so very different from the Blackpool where he grew up prompted him to question “the nature of this world my son is growing into.” In conducting his exploration of the influences which make Italians so Italian, from the privileged position of the informed outsider, he assesses Italians from pre-birth to adolescence and then on to the post-childhood dependency which he sees as the curious situation of many of his Italian contemporaries.

After Italian Neighbors (1992), his first astute and witty book on life in the Veneto, Parks was characterized as a sort of up-market Peter Mayle: a writer who provided engaging local Mediterranean colour without pidgin Italian and disingenuous sentimentality. With An Italian Education he seems more like Desmond Morris, relentlessly observing his young children and their friends. Again, however, he has succeeded in writing a thoughtful and humane account of a society undergoing rapid change while simultaneously respecting apparently eternal values.

Sitting on a crowded beach in Pescara, he observes people all around him, “without exception doing exactly what is expected of them.” Which, of course, is something more complex than doing what they're told, or doing what they are meant to be doing. For Parks detects at the heart of the Italian character an “absence of any relation between what ‘should’ and what ‘can be’, between rules and reality.” Italian children learn this when their parents tell them, with apparent vigour, that it is too late for them to be up, they are too young for wine and have already had enough cake. They are then poured a little wine and they grab a pastry. Their parents follow this sort of logic when not paying taxes or obeying new regulations about back-seat car safety-belts.

Parks does not eschew clichés or national stereotypes, because he is aware that there is much truth in them; also, in examining them, he proves that they are only part of the truth. While children are both spoilt and frustrated, and the adults are both emotional and Machiavellian, Parks still feels that Italy is probably one of the best places to bring up children. The point of King Lear, he believes, must be lost on most Italians, who would ask, “Why didn't Cordelia put on a bit more of a show for her foolish old father? For there are times when a little falsehood is expected of you, because appearance has a value in itself, indicating precisely your willingness to keep up an appearance,” and he realizes that the observance of these conventions confers real benefits to all concerned.

In focusing so closely on his own children and immediate circle, in order to illustrate a larger whole, Parks avoids the home-movie syndrome, and adds convincing objectivity to his analysis by explicitly linking domestic episodes to larger more general points. Michele's love of fishing and Steffi's exuberant approach to pocket-money enhance rather than detract from his thesis. He ranges widely. Obvious influences on the Italian character such as the role and status of the mamma, or the impact of Catholicism, “still the default setting in a hedonistic society,” are neatly and comprehensively analysed. But so are the minutiae of house purchase, the treatment of refugees, the methods of insurance salesmen and, of course, football.

Parks's novels contain startling insights into human motivation and character, leavened with stylish black humour. In An Italian Education he filters the raw material of human behaviour to reveal some fundamental truths, and he takes obvious pleasure in dissecting the Italian language and its many proverbs and figures of speech, too. His interest in language is infectious, even if on occasion he slides into the territory of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, as he examines the etymology of verbs, the uses of blasphemy and the mysteries of dialect.

Parks is often brutally honest, not least about his in-laws. It initially shocks when he accuses his mother-in-law in print of the theft, or the “borrowing,” of his wife's cosmetics. Then one realizes that this cultural tagging game cuts both ways. Brutal honesty is what is expected from “Teem” as he is called. In fact he is loved for it, because this is what is natural to him. He is an icy northern Protestant after all.