The Italian Lover
By Robert Hellenga
Little, Brown, 343 pages, $23.99
Perhaps sometimes it’s best not to know what becomes of literary characters to whom we’ve grown attached. Case in point: Margot Harrington.
The 29-year-old American expatriate book conservator, visiting Florence in 1966, was the charming hero of “The Sixteen Pleasures,” the 1994 best seller by Robert Hellenga. She went to Italy to help save books damaged in a flood. But while there, she also developed a powerful sense of her personal and professional self when entrusted with the restoration and sale of a unique 17th Century volume of erotic engravings and poems.
“The Italian Lover” is a sequel to that thoroughly enjoyable novel, and while it has some pleasures of its own, they’re too few and more tepid. Hellenga, an English professor at Knox College in Galesburg, is a skillful writer equally adept at intimate character study, travelogue, description of various crafts and the well-paced intertwining of an array of plot threads and personalities. His characters, though a touch melancholy, are sympathetic, quirky and believable. They have well-drawn histories and an appealing appetite for life, beauty and knowledge. And his most remarkable achievement might be the one hiding in plain sight: He’s that too-rare male novelist who can create and sustain deeply reflective female characters.
But there’s a touch of melodrama and contrivance in this continuation of Margot’s story that didn’t taint its precursor. There’s also an unsavory taste of self-promotion in its setup — a team comes to Florence to make a film about Margot and her adventures with “The Sixteen Pleasures.” (In a titular doubling effect, “The Sixteen Pleasures” was also the name of the Renaissance volume, and “The Italian Lover” is also the name of the film about Margot’s discovery of the book. And because Margot’s first-person narration makes up only some of “The Sixteen Pleasures,” the whole premise doesn’t entirely make sense.)
“The Italian Lover” draws you in with the brisk confidence and grace of Hellenga’s writing, but the characters and dialogue are less nuanced and interesting than in the earlier novel. Hellenga has clearly researched the film industry as conscientiously as he has Italy, book conservation, elite auction houses, papal divorce criteria, the avocado industry, the blues, the classics and a number of other topics that pop up in his tales. Yet while the details of the cast, crew and production of “The Italian Lover” ring true, the commentary on film as both art and business is pretty bland. And it’s a daring subject to tackle, given how admirably other modern novelists have treated it — John Fowles, for instance, in his underrated, psychologically rich “Daniel Martin,” and Robert Stone, in his disturbingly atmospheric “Children of Light.”
In fairness, part of the letdown of Hellenga’s new book is also its theme: aging. It’s 1990, Margot is in her 50s, and she and her love interest, classics professor and amateur blues guitarist Alan “Woody” Woodhull (whom we met in Hellenga’s “The Fall of a Sparrow”) have become not just sadder and wiser, but a little repetitive, inflexible and whiny. Peripheral passions, like Margot’s devotion to fountain pens, seemed kind of winsome in limited doses in “The Sixteen Pleasures” but now come across as more habitual and neurotic. The pens, for instance, were telling and somewhat exotic Freudian transference objects in the earlier book after Margot’s married lover, Sandro, left her. But now they’re just a dreary fixation.
” ‘The newer Duofolds,’ ” she tells Woody in one of their typically meticulous, humorless conversations, ” ‘have plastic feeds that tend to melt before they can be adjusted.’ She pulled the nib out with her gripping pliers and examined it through a jeweler’s loupe. ‘You want to look? You can see that the left tine is sprung.’ ” And so on — two pages of pen mechanics.
The book’s mild but pervasive sense of depression is bearable because it’s accompanied by some limited, further self-discovery on Margot’s part, and Woody’s too. But having met Margot in a radically more active period of her life, her relative inertia here, however realistic, is simply anticlimactic.
The ingenue playing Margot in the film is Miranda, for whom “The Italian Lover” is a big break after years of paying the bills doing TV commercials in Los Angeles. She falls for Zanni, an older Marcello Mastroianni-like Italian leading man. But he has a dalliance with Beryl, the deceptively prim wife of the film’s director, Michael. Michael is trying to rise above a career’s worth of middling films after his dazzling young-turk debut (an adaptation of a Chekhov story) back in the golden age of art house. Guido, the dolly grip and part of a Rome film-industry family, gets involved with Miranda. And producing the film is Esther, who has just divorced her longtime husband and professional partner, Harry.
Margot has money issues, and Esther manipulates her into entering the film project without control of the script after options on the story have withered for 15 years under other producers. Margot eventually discovers that her story of sensually charged self-discovery in the colorful context of a rare-art find has been turned into a somewhat ditzy romantic comedy with the happy ending she never had, sort of an “Under the Florentine Sun.”
Miranda’s ascension and Margot’s plateau could be the stuff of some absorbing life-cycle philosophizing. Furthermore, the Altmanesque skewing of the story board, shunting to the side Margot’s tale to create room center screen for these other folk, not only has a lot of potential, but is also apropos, mirroring Michael’s and Guido’s fondness for difficult tracking shots, a fondness that during one crane shot puts them in physical jeopardy.
But while we all carry baggage when we travel, collectively, this group’s is over the weight limit. Woody wrestles his demons from the loss of his daughter to a terrorist bombing in Bologna a decade before and the trauma that inflicted on his family (his wife became a nun, and he had an affair with one of his students). His continuing angst spurs Woody to save a dog from its abusive owner, scion of a powerful Florentine clan, and Woody’s fate, and Margot’s, too, is weirdly linked to that of the dog, whom Woody names Biscotti. Meanwhile, Michael is dying of cancer, and this film is his last chance to rise above mediocrity — which, puzzlingly, we are to believe he does, even though the script he has to work with sounds pretty lousy. Beryl, daughter of a minister and inclined toward fatalistic religious reverie, is at one point locked into a cemetery. Meanwhile, Esther, while trying to prove to the world how gutsy and capable she is on her own, seeks an Italian rabbi’s formal dissolution of her marriage.
None of those individual elements is hopelessly over the top, and in fact Michael and Beryl’s relationship, particularly, is quite compelling, with its formidable sacrifice and forgiveness on both their parts. But taken together, these ingredients are like a not fully earned swell of movie string music. That’s not surprising really, because they are indeed not fully earned; they rely on back story from Hellenga’s other novels (in addition to the two mentioned, 2006’s “Philosophy Made Simple” follows the story of Margot’s father, Rudy).
While Hellenga’s puzzle-piece approach to writing is, on one level, clever, it also carries liabilities, and he might have done better to heed the advice of one of his own characters. ” ‘Cliches aren’t the enemy,’ ” Michael tells Guido when they’re discussing screenplays. ” ‘Intentionality is the enemy. Don’t plan too much. Don’t think too much. Let things happen.’ “
Cliches, however, are also occasionally the enemy here. Esther, for instance, is just a bit much; she says and thinks things like ” ‘Agent smaygent’ ” and even “Dante Schmante.” At a meeting with Margot:
“Esther spread her hands out, palms up. ‘I’ll tell you what you got. You got me. You got Esther Klein, and Esther won’t let you down. The big boys are all waiting to see what happens.’ “
Character schmaracter.
Then there’s that nagging self-promotional aspect I mentioned. I could live with the emotionally overloaded filming of the ostensibly thrilling cheval-glass lovemaking scene from “The Sixteen Pleasures,” though it struck me that the original scene, while tersely effective, was not all that memorable. But my needle turned decisively downward on Hellenga’s self-references when Miranda peruses a Rome bookshop:
“She scanned the fiction section for ‘The Sixteen Pleasures’ and found three copies of the American edition. There was a British edition too, and an Italian translation. She looked at it and thought of buying it, and then another browser, a woman who looked like her mother — or what her mother would have looked like if she’d been Italian — spoke to her in Italian. Miranda had to apologize. ‘Non parlo italiano,’ she managed to say. The woman spoke to her in English.
” ‘It’s really very good,’ she said. ‘I’ve read it in English and Italian.’ “
Well how ’bout that? Why not just insert a tear-off order card for “The Sixteen Pleasures” right there?
Forgive my cattiness. It’s just that as Margot and Miranda well know, love so often disappoints, and we’re toughest on those from whom we expect a lot. Hellenga at his best is a fine writer, and he’s not at his best here. His readers deserve better. More important, Margot deserves better.
Toward the end of “The Sixteen Pleasures,” Margot steps out onto a scenic balcony with a glass of wine and considers her recent adventures:
“A new chapter was beginning in my life. . . . The last one had been very eventful; I couldn’t imagine that the next would be as exciting.”
She was right.
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Alexander C. Kafka edits essays on social sciences and the arts for The Chronicle of Higher Education and has written book and arts reviews for many publications. He blogs at rokovoko.blogspot.com.
