Fiction
Meeting Lily
By Sarah Woodhouse. St. Martin's Press.
Something is afoot at the Villa Giulia, the small Italian hotel at the center of Sarah Woodhouse's third novel, "Meeting Lily." One of the guests, Major Baghot, has died in his sleep, and his spirited widow Molly doesn't seem to be mourning; instead she happily roams the countryside. The 
chambermaid Graziella, a local orphan, falls in love with a young Catholic priest. And Mrs. Prescott catches the eye of Dr. Fortuno, the dashing village physician. What used to be a peaceful haven for wine tasting and siestas has become chaos. Nan Mortimer, the Villa Giulia's English innkeeper -- she opened the hotel after the death of her own husband seven years earlier -- doesn't know what to make of it.
Set in post-war Italy and written in the tradition of Elizabeth von Arnim's "Enchanted April," "Meeting Lily" is ripe with clashes of culture and tradition. While Nan struggles to hold her life -- and her household -- together, she also faces the dilemma of being "an Englishwoman among Italians," a stranger in a country she has come to think of as her own. As she becomes entangled in the lives and melodramas of her eccentric guests, she begins to realize that anything is possible -- perhaps even falling in love again.
The rich texture of this light, captivating narrative often resembles that of a Merchant-Ivory film. Woodhouse is a fine storyteller, and her soothing, sing-songy prose and lush landscape descriptions make the Villa Giulia a perfect destination -- and an excellent waiting place for the much-anticipated arrival of Lily.
-- Meg Cohen Ragas
To order your copy |
Back to front page of Sneak Peeks
Jackson's Dilemma
By Iris Murdoch. Viking.
Ever since she made her debut with "Under The Net," Iris Murdoch has continued to perfect the freewheeling novel of ideas, in which philosophical positions are happily subordinated to the quirks and tics of human character. "Jackson's Dilemma" continues this literary hot streak, which has now lasted for more than forty years. As the novel opens, a storybook marriage is about to take place between Edward Lannion, the master of an idyllic country manor called Hatting Hall, and Marian Fox. The night before the ceremony, however, Marian shocks Edward and a half-dozen friends by bailing out, without a word of 
explanation. The immediate effect is bafflement, tinged in every case by "very private griefs, losses, regrets, and disappointments." Yet Marian's no-show eventually brings about a Shakespearean reshuffling among the characters, each of whom ends up with the appropriate beloved. To whom do we owe this spate of happy endings? Part of the credit must go to Jackson, a mysterious butler who seems to dabble in angelic intervention. But, this being a Murdoch novel, I'd also suggest that there's a kind of Platonic machinery at work, which inclines the characters toward love as a heightened form of consciousness. This doesn't, of course, take romantic passion out of the picture. At one point Murdoch compares the process of falling in love to "someone undergoing, still conscious, a very serious operation by a wonderful surgeon whom he trusted utterly, and all the time his eyes were open." That captures it very nicely, Platonic or otherwise.
--James Marcus
To order your copy |
Back to front page of Sneak Peeks
