Innocence : a novel /

The story of how Chiara and Salvatore got married is both involving and amusing, as told by Englishwoman Fitzgerald with her usual enticing flair. Chiara Ridolfi hails from an old but poor aristocratic Italian family ensconced in a Florentine villa. Dr. Salvatore Rossi, the man she sets her cap for, is initially determined to remain as dispassionate toward romantic entanglements as he is toward political ones. In a sort of drawing-room comedy/drama set in the 1950s, Fitzgerald limns the steps taken not only by Chiara and Salvatore, but also by their families and friends in effecting a union. As in her previous novels, particularly At Freddie's (Booklist 82:108 S 15 85), Fitzgerald combines subtle humor and amazingly deft character building with a pleasing touch of puckish irony. The result is a special novel that doesn't zip along but moves with charming poise. BH. [OCLC] 86-31831

This charming, amusing and deft novel by a winner of the Booker Prize is set in Florence in the 1950s, though the characters might have stepped directly out of the Renaissance. The slightly eccentric characters share the trait suggested by the title, and never once does Fitzgerald strike a false note. Unique in the annals of Euro-American marital commerce is an aging count who trades his aristocratic lineage to an American in marriage and is ``left worse off than before.'' His daughter, beautiful, featherbrained Chiara, loves the solemnly scientific neurologist Salvatore, who has fled his native southern Italy and his father's deep involvement in politics; the elder is a passionate disciple of one of Mussolini's most distinguished victims. Others in a richly peopled scene include Maddalena, accurately known as Aunt Mad, and the hearty, bumptious, meddling, English schoolgirl Barney. This is a comedy of manners in the distinctively English tradition, brimming with the sweet pleasures of that high style. The novel shines with intelligence, wit, sly irony and the observant eye of a writer who seems unable to miss anything pertinent to her vocation. (April 30) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This thickly textured comedy of manners, by Booker Prize-winner Fitzgerald (the mystery The Golden Child, 1979, and the non-fiction The Knox Brothers, 1978) serves up a dish of wit and wry so chockablock with eccentric characters that it may be too rich a concoction for the American palate. Set in Italy in the 1950's, the novel spans times past and present, geographies of North and South, politics and nuances of politesse. Its characters are scientists and men of God, aristocrats and communists, wine makers, dressmakers, failed philanthropists, ardent and indifferent stutters. The Ridolfi, an ancient noble family are crumbling like their villa, the Ricordanza, into genteel poverty and idiosyncracy. The old Count and his sister Maddalena come and go in the Ricordanza or in their equally decrepit flat in Florence. The Count keeps himself remote while his sister engages in misguided charity; she establishes a Refuge in which old women look after homeless infants (""The toothless would comfortably coexist with the toothless""). The Count's daughter Chiara, educated in England, meanwhile meets Dr. Salvatore Rossi at a concert and is smitten. Salvatore, from the South, ill-tempered, bad-mannered, poor, turns his back on his roots in Mazzata, bis parcel of land there, and his obligations (according to his father's communist comrades--disciples of Antonio Gramsci) to return to Mazzata only as resident intellectual. Chiara in result invites her English schoolmate Barney to advise her in affairs of the heart: Barney, big-boned and big-hearted, makes a big mess as she tries both to counsel Chiara and to find her own suitable or unsuitable mate. As Barney, Chiara, and Maddalena (at whose Refuge the old ladies stash away the babies from potential adopters) and their fellows discover, helping others can have disastrous results. In lively prose, Fitzgerald pins down her characters so brilliantly--often with one incisive sentence--that they threaten to become specimens, distanced by her cleverness. This is a peculiarly English dessert, dense as trifle, to be ingested slowly, not swallowed whole. An acquired taste. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.