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ITALIAN FEVER VALERIE MARTIN,
W&N £12.99
Novels about British or American women finding love
in the Tuscan hills can seem like a cliché.
Henry James wrote one, E.M.Forster wrote two and I
must confess to a couple of them myself. It’s
asking for trouble to publish another. Men hate the
idea that Italian men really are divine in bed, women
hate the idea of other women enjoying themselves and
everybody except John Mortimer and this magazine’s
esteemed proprietor goes a bilious shade of green at
the very word Tuscany.
Yet Valerie Martin’s Italian Fever is an absolute
joy to read. Having won the Orange Prize last year
for her dour romance Property, about living on a slave
plantation, she is here in happier territory with a
novel that is part love-story, part ghost-story and
a wholly enjoyable and intelligent summer read. Its
heroine, the knowingly-named Lucy, is editor to one
of the world’s worst, best-selling novelists.
Martin has immense fun describing just how terrible
his macho writing is. “Thinly disguised accounts
of his own life”, DV’s novels feature “big,
strong men with large appetites, big ideas” though
their author is “not five feet five”, often
ill and “had so thoroughly destroyed his digestive
tract with bourbon that he subsisted on a bland diet
of boiled meat and rice.” Lucy is relieved when
she hears he’s died without finishing another
abysmal book.
Asked to retrieve his unfinished m/s, she travels
to Italy, and is met by Massimo, a startlingly handsome
married Italian with “wolf’s eyes” who
rapidly seduces her when she is ill. So far, so much
as expected. Yet DV has died in a septic tank, under
mysterious circumstances, and in the absence of Michael
Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen to do the sleuthing, Lucy
has to investigate it herself. She visits her author’s
landlords, a snotty pair of aristocrats whose plain,
stiff son Antonio is chillingly aloof. She visits DV’s
ex-wife, Catherine, a voluptuous painter in Rome. She
has one too many epiphanies in front of Great Italian
Art, and an inexplicable encounter with the supernatural,
but the lessons she takes back to Brooklyn are touchingly
unexpected.
Lucy is an engaging New Yorker, of a kind too seldom
met in fiction, though happily plentiful in real life.
Plain and middle-aged, she is sensible, sensitive,
civilised and modest. She can’t understand why
her publisher wants the coarse fictions of her employer,
her own sensibilities having been formed by Henry James,
but she copes. Wryly observant of snobbery in both
its American and European forms, she gives way to “the
foreign universe of desire, passion and obsession” because “nobody
had ever shown such an interest in her before,” and
because, like all of us, she has an imaginary film
version of herself which she has not yet learnt to
laugh at.
All the characters are drawn with discretion and assurance,
and Lucy’s inevitable withdrawal from Massimo,
after their period of erotic bliss, is done with dignity.
She knows she will never have another night like the
nights she spent with him – and I’m afraid,
for many women who have had their own Massimos, this
is all too true – but what she discovers about
friendship is far more important, interesting and sustaining.
This is a wise, intelligent novel about how bad writers
can suffer just as much for their art as good ones,
and how true friendship is better than a thousand kisses.
It is a distinguished addition to the tradition of
Tuscan fictions.
The New Statesman, July 2004 |
