FICTION

THE SIXTEEN PLEASURES by Robert Hellenga (Soho Press: $22; 332 pp.) They used to say that novels were unseemly and even dangerous, particularly for female readers, who might get ideas about sex and romance and try to apply them to their domestic situations. This novel has several potentially dangerous ingredients. Margot, a serious restorer of antique books, ups and goes to Florence after the flooding of the Arno, ostensibly to help out but really to put a jagged turn in her life. Italy, unattached woman, books: the big danger signs. While helping to restore a local convent’s library, Margot is entrusted with a volume called “The Sixteen Pleasures,” a book of erotic drawings by Giulio Romano with accompanying Sonetti lussuriosi by Aretino. The convent’s abbess asks her to take it away to avoid scandal. Margot restores the volume and in the process meets a man, a restorer of frescoes, whom she trusts, even though everyone who knows him says she shouldn’t. It must be said that Margot in love has a very strange, detached equanimity, which strikes me as more male than female, and which one sees now and then in female characters drawn by men. But the most wonderful thing about this novel is how contained it is, an adventure under pressure. Its central metaphor is that life is more like a piazza than a road: “A piazza is a microcosm,” the author tells us on the last page, “not a way of getting from one place to another.”