Boyfriend and girlfriend are such immature terms, suitable to describe teenage relationships but oddly naive when describing adult pairings. That immaturity, however, is why the terms fit Max and Leonie: The fully adult protagonists in Katy Simpson Smith’s new novel The Maltese Version are just that: boyfriend and girlfriend.
They are serious adults. Max is especially serious. A literary translator, he struggles dramatically to incorporate the culture, history, and language of foreign writers into his American versions. Leonie is a travel writer, adept at translating foreign cuisine and club scenes into easy, alluring prose. Max and Leonie agree this is a kind of translation with less ambition.
Their relationship also seems to lack ambition. They met in Sicily, while traveling, and then again in their hometown of Chicago, at a poetry reading. Who pursued whom depends on which member of the couple is telling the story, but in neither telling is the relationship fueled by passion. They feel warmly toward each other but only considered moving in together briefly when Leonie’s lease ran out. In the end, they loved their daily routines more and decided cohabitation was inconvenient.
The relationship seems content to drift along until Max is rather suddenly hired to translate a rising young Maltese poet. While he is well established in academic circles, this would be his first translation of a living author, and he takes the job despite having to leave for Malta immediately. On the day he flies out, Leonie accidentally discovers she is pregnant, and among the many questions this raises for her, the paramount one for Smith’s plot is how she should tell Max, now so far away.
Whatever emotional complexities might come with this conversation take an immediate back seat to the logistics of communication. Ana, the domineering and passionate poet Max is to translate, has insisted that he give her his phone in order to focus exclusively on understanding and translating her poetry. So Max, who has already forgotten to check in with Leonie upon landing, does not answer her texts or phone calls.
These plot features — the sudden, almost emergency need to fly to Malta and begin the translation immediately and the convenient elimination of digital communication — feel a bit contrived, but they set up the conflict efficiently. While Leonie is in Chicago trying to fit motherhood into her world view, wondering what role her partner might play in this new life, Max is feeling passionate love — or lust, or intellectual stimulation — thousands of miles away.
The novel settles into character development more than plot. Max develops badly. He cannot integrate his desire for Ana and her fierce independence with his own male prerogative for dominance. Her criticism of his translations quickly become rejections of his passion for her, and it is not long before even Ana can’t stand to be around him.
Back in Chicago, Leonie moves past her panicked sense of abandonment toward independence. Free to rethink her dependence on Max, she finds a new intellectual confidence and begins her own translation of Ana’s poems.
The approach to language is held out here as analogous to the approach to life and relationships. Max’s insistence on accuracy and logic is contrasted with Leonie and Ana’s greater reliance on sound and feeling. The discussions of the nature of language and translation are more entertaining than they might sound here because Smith’s prose is always lively and often beautiful in surprising ways. She has a gift for original metaphors and for visual description. Readers may soon find themselves booking trips to Malta just to experience the beauty Smith describes so enticingly.
While this distant lover’s triangle dominates the novel, there are several other relationships, covering multiple generations, that reinforce it. Smith’s attention remains focused on the female characters. Herschel, Max’s agent, accompanies him to Malta and, while it is not clear what she is supposed to be doing there, she becomes an independent observer of the action, mildly bemused by Max’s mixture of lust and intellect. She seems wise, as if she knows the outcome of events before they happen. Ana’s mother, Nunzia, appears in flashbacks that make clear Ana’s intense desire for artistic independence has roots in her family. Most important is Leonie’s close friend, Rhoda. When Leonie balks at the idea of chasing Max to Malta to tell him of his fatherhood, Rhoda goes in her place. Her husband is notably more supportive of her, and the creative milieu she stumbles upon in Malta becomes life-changing.
Given that arc for Rhoda, I found the conclusion to Leonie and Max’s story somewhat deflating. The novel constantly revolves around ideas of dependence and independence, stasis and change, the definite and the vague. In the end, we are still circling those poles, following a boyfriend and girlfriend who seem unwilling to let their relationship grow up.
FICTION
The Maltese Version
By Katy Simpson Smith
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published August 18, 2026
Southern Review of Books 