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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
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Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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Italian Fever
Reviewed by Vivian Dorsel
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Italian Fever is the latest novel by Valerie Martin, author of six books, including Mary Reilly and The Great Divorce. For eight years its heroine, Lucy Stark, has worked out of her Brooklyn apartment as assistant to the well-known novelist DV – transcribing his books onto the computer, making travel and business arrangements, dealing with his agent and his publisher – as he has traveled about the world gaining inspiration for his books. His five published novels have been great popular and financial successes – two of them made into films – but they are terrible.
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 Italian Fever Novel by Valerie Martin Hardcover - $15.40 Published July 1999 Knopf |
The first part of his latest manuscript has just arrived from Italy, where he has been living for several months. Lucy has just begun working on it when she receives an urgent phone call from the American Embassy in Rome: DV is dead, killed in a strange accident near his villa in Tuscany. After talking with his agent, his editor, and his three ex-wives, Lucy finds herself designated to go to Italy to arrange for DV’s burial, pack up his belongings, and settle his affairs.
Thus Lucy embarks on a trip that begins as a mere administrative nuisance but becomes a complex adventure in which she attempts to clarify the unusual circumstances surrounding her employer’s death: Why was DV wandering about the countryside in the dark on the night he died? What happened to his final manuscript? Why did Catherine, the artist/lover who had accompanied DV to Italy, leave? What is the meaning of the two things Lucy finds in the bedroom – a wrenching, revealing portrait sketch of DV, and a puzzling letter, written in Italian?
The literary patron saints of Italian Fever are E.M. Forster and Henry James, although Martin’s attitude toward them is not entirely reverent. The novel’s epigraph – "Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn’t understand!" – is a quotation from Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, and Lucy shares her first name with the heroine of another of his novels, A Room with a View. Lucy is the quintessential Jamesian character – a lucid, though slightly bewildered, reflecting consciousness through whose third-person viewpoint we see, and gradually understand, the true nature of European culture and customs and of the other characters. Henry James is almost parodically present in the Turn-of-the-Screw-like apparitions sneaking around the edges of the story, and is even invoked by name, absurdly, in the graveside eulogy given by DV’s Italian editor. Lucy herself (James’s "most polished of possible mirrors") keeps being startled by the unexpected view of herself in the mirror of the bedroom wardrobe.
The setting is the Tuscan countryside in late summer, evoking visions of gnarled, silvery-green olive trees, fields of sunflowers stretching to infinity, walled medieval villages perched on distant hills, the sun, the art, the wine – and, of course, the food, which Martin describes sensually, almost lovingly. (Is it possible to contemplate Italy for more than a minute without salivating?)
