Book Reviews
The fall from innocence of Americans abroad is a Jamesian theme, but here the Grand Tour has been replaced by international finance and the naïfs are married Harvard grads, posted to Rome. The husband, the scion of a shabby but genteel New England clan, disdains his Wasp heritage and worships his black wife; she is drawn to a predatory Italian, a “peasant” who has bullied his way to the helm of a corporate empire. The adultery plays out in first-class airport lounges and ornate hotel rooms, and Rome reprises its traditional role as the city of dissolution, “rich and coarse at the same time, like a mixture of sackcloth and brocade.” In chillingly urbane prose, Lee takes the full measure of her characters’ folly, as they prove faithless not only to each other but to themselves.
The New Yorker
Two handsome young Americans marry, move to Rome, and pursue interesting careers while having a daughter. The wife, Mira, also pursues an enigmatic affair with coarse and calculating upstart Zenin, a toy-manufacturing billionaire. As readers know from page one, the marriage has failed painfully, with Mira having gone on to marry an Italian named Vanni and given birth to two sons. Meanwhile, embittered ex-husband Nick lives in London with his new wife and their two daughters. Because Mira is African American and Nick old-line (if not rich) New England, the failure of their relationship also seems like a failure of ideals. The novel treads between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, as Mira and Nick's daughter heads to Harvard, alma mater of her parents. The portraits are incisive, the cultural insights fresh, and the deliquescent prose a pleasure to read, yet the novel can seem static. With so much foretold, there's little sense of revelation, and though one can applaud Lee (Russian Journal) for her restrained approach, what reasons seem to surface for Mira's deserting Nick just don't add up for this reviewer. One can't turn down Lee's first novel in 20 years, but if delicious it's still a puzzle. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal