Circling

MARTHA McPHEE’S ambitious third novel, “L’America,” is the latest, and in many ways the least explicit, of the recent novels shaped by the post-Sept. 11 world. The most prominent of these, both published in 2005, are Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s “The Writing on the Wall,” which describes the attacks on the World Trade Center through the eyes of a young woman walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and explores how the tragedy revived the trauma of loss for her, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” which is narrated by a precocious 9-year-old whose father is killed in the attacks. In “L’America,” McPhee positions Sept. 11 as a central moment in the life of her main character, Beth, but describes it peripherally, sometimes in the future, sometimes in the past.

This setup subtly suggests that “L’America” has integrated the trauma; it also provides the story with an elastic sense of time -- the novel moves between the years 1519 and 2017 -- and thus an unusual historical perspective. By exploring a cross-cultural love affair, McPhee obliquely raises questions about American cultural assumptions that have become part of the post-Sept. 11 literary landscape.

“L’America” begins with a description of the only fresco created by sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, painted in 1519 when he was 19 and in love with his cousin Valeria. Valeria is central to the painting, and their unrequited love is the thematic image underlying the story of Cesare, who is descended from the Cellini banking family, and the idiosyncratic American Beth, the daughter of a strong-willed woman killed in a car accident in Turkey and a visionary hippie who retreated to rural Pennsylvania after his wife’s death. Beth’s family is not unlike the complicated countercultural groupings that McPhee presented in the novels “Bright Angel Time” and “Gorgeous Lies” (a 2002 National Book Award nominee).

Beth and Cesare meet on a Greek island in 1982, when she is in her teens and traveling with a girlfriend. Cesare is besotted with all things American: “A fast car on a wide American highway. A free soul from an exotic land of deserts with blood-red canyons and buttes and mesas that scrape the sky; a land of strip towns with drive-thru-just-about-everything, seedy hotels.... A drive-in movie theater, jazz, and alligators in the bayous....” You get the picture. Cesare identifies Beth with the country’s seductive qualities: “[S]he was abundance and risk, experimentation and discovery....”

Cesare is a literary descendant of Henry James’ Italian aristocrat Amerigo in “The Golden Bowl,” who has a similar response to the free-spirited American Charlotte: For him Charlotte wore “a reference in all her person, in motion and gesture ... to winds and waves and custom-houses, to far countries and long journeys, the knowledge of how and where and the habit, founded on experience, of not being afraid.” Indeed, McPhee sets up a contemporary Jamesian counterpoint between the centuries-old practices expected of Cesare, with his connection to family, business, estate and city (Citta, in northern Italy), and the wide-open, adventurous future that Beth takes for granted.

Beth develops a passion for Italian cuisine, writing cookbooks and starting restaurants. She and Cesare pursue a push-pull affair for years, each hoping the other will relocate, each unwilling or unable to give up a cultural birthright.

There are some dull notes in McPhee’s descriptions (“He liked to explore every inch of her as if he could find in her the answer”), and some expository passages about love or summaries of events tend to slow things down. Most problematic is the narrative structure. McPhee is explicit in her intentions, referring to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s theories about history “consuming itself, regurgitating itself, repeating itself endlessly. We’re tricked into believing in history’s linearity. But it circles and circles and circles around on itself, learning little, trapping itself like the snake that eats its own tail.” The novel’s plot is so circular that it undercuts any surprises or dramatic tension. We learn that Beth has a daughter named Valeria, born in 1997, before we see Beth and Cesare meet in 1982. Elsewhere, McPhee writes: “Beth enjoyed looking, from the perspective of time, at the sequence of events that lead to the unfolding of a life. Not just her own life but any life.... Her daughter Valeria ... would have a penchant for this, too.” It’s as if McPhee had mined her novel with a series of spoilers, distancing us from the story’s power.

At its best, though, “L’America” captures the headlong energy of falling in love for the first time and discovering a sensual culture -- and after many twists and turns it reaches a transcendent ending.