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