A last supper to remember

JESSE BROWNER’S latest book, “The Uncertain Hour,” is that very rare thing -- a historical novel of love and ideas not only free of pedantry, but also serious and entertaining.

As one would expect from an award-winning translator of both Jean Cocteau and Rainer Maria Rilke, it’s also elegantly written with a narrative so well-realized that it’s easy to overlook the 46-year-old author’s formal audacity.

Browner’s story unfolds over a single night in a seaside Roman villa in the year 66 AD, the 12th year of the Emperor Nero’s 14-year reign. The last of the Claudian emperors was a preening tyrant of unusual cultural pretense, and the book’s protagonist and narrator, Titus Petronius, is Nero’s official “Arbiter of Elegance” -- a court functionary who served as the ruler’s advisor on questions of fashion, involving everything including dress and food as well as music and literature. Petronius, however, has been falsely implicated in an assassination plot, and Nero has posted soldiers around his villa and given him the choice of suicide that night or arrest and execution in the morning. “The Arbiter” -- man of good Roman taste that he is -- has chosen suicide, but he has invited a select group of friends to a sumptuous, nightlong banquet during which music will be played, poetry recited, witticisms and ironies exchanged.

As far as Petronius is concerned, the most important of the guests is Marcus Valerius Martialis, a young, dissolute and undisciplined Iberian-born poet to whom the Arbiter has extended his personal patronage. We know the historical Martialis as Martial, master of the epigram and inspiration to generations of poets down to our own time. (Nobel and former U.S. Poet Laureate Joseph Brodsky dedicated his famous “Letters to a Roman Friend” to Martial.)

If Titus Petronius’ name strikes a familiar chord, that’s because he is the author of “The Satyricon,” which most scholars consider the first recognizable novel in the Western canon. Though it survives only in extended fragments of approximately novella length, many classicists believe that the original manuscript may have been 400,000 words long and stretched across 20 volumes. T.S. Eliot quotes it directly as a preface to “The Waste Land” and F. Scott Fitzgerald noted its influence on “The Great Gatsby.” Even in its fragmentary form, Petronius’ book is remarkable because it rejects the usual classical forays into the mythological and delivers an unparalleled account of daily Roman life. Indeed, though it was circulated hand-to-hand throughout the Middle Ages, it remained unpublished until the 17th century because of its scandalous earthiness, including the main characters’ homosexual affection for one another.

Those familiar with the text will recall the famous “Banquet of Trimalchio” in which a boorish and impossibly vulgar arriviste attempts to impress his guests with a stunning banquet that includes this:

“We were starting on the lighter dishes, a basket was brought in on a tray, with a wooden hen in it, her wings spread round, as if she were hatching. Then two slaves came with their eternal singing, and began searching the straw, whence they rooted out some peahen’s eggs, and distributed them among the guests.... Thereupon we took up our spoons ... and broke the eggs that were made of rich pastry. I had been almost on the point of throwing my share away, for I thought I had a chick in it, until hearing an old hand saying, ‘There must be something good in this,’ I delved deeper -- and found a very fat fig-pecker inside, surrounded by peppered egg yolk.”

Fig-peckers were among the cooked songbirds on which Romans doted, along with dormice in honey. Browner has done a fine and meticulous job borrowing from the actual “Satyricon” dishes for Petronius’ lovingly described last supper, including fried lamprey (with the vinegar sauce on the side) sausages, stuffed roast boar and sow’s vulva, Syrian figs and pomegranates. All, of course, are accompanied by the Romans’ ubiquitous condiment, garum, which consisted of salted fish guts that had been allowed to ferment (sort of a Thai fish sauce run amok).

As impressive as it is, the culinary and other equally meticulous historical reconstructions are complementary pleasures to this finely wrought novel’s heart -- Petronius’ nightlong ruminations on a life that, by dawn, he may or may not adjudge wasted. He has been a man for whom sex has been mainly a form of relief, but as the night wears on, his thoughts turn to his one great love and the realization that putting it ahead of ambition might have spared him his fate.

He had met his love, a married woman, in secret, and “from the moment he was with her, he was nothing, he disappeared, he was a crumb at the corner of her mouth, thoughtlessly licked away by her indifferent tongue.... As for the intensity of his passion, he had never believed in love, had no interest in its vocabulary or conventions. Now, wary of exploring the nature of his feelings for his lover, all he knew and all he cared to know was that he was consumed by desire that, in the consummation, made him feel consummately known by the consumer, in a way that he had not even suspected he wished to be known by anyone. He felt like a piece of fruit, a most delicious apple whose sole reason for existing is to be eaten, and that some miracle allowed him to be reborn each time he was devoured, only to be devoured again.”

The story’s heart, however, is located in the exchanges with Martial -- to whom Petronius’ ultimately entrusts his secretly composed manuscript of “The Satyricon.” Browner’s Martial is a bohemian nonconformist: a critic of the manners and mores, the flattery and pretension of the society in which Petronius would like to find him a place. (Though of provincial origin and, as Browner portrays him, of perennially distressed means, the historical Martial won the patronage of the emperors Trajan and Dormitian through infamous flattery.)

For the purposes of this story, Martial rages against Petronius’ surrender to convention and his refusal to take flight in the fully provisioned yacht moored off the villa. He even ridicules his patron’s distress over having to approach death with no certainty as to his life’s meaning:

“It’s just that I don’t see what’s so great about certainty,” he says as the dawn nears. “Why does there have to be some great revelation? Why do you need it to be all wrapped up so neatly at the end? Why can’t you die in confusion and shame, and doubt and anger and fear, as you have lived? Isn’t that the more honest death? Isn’t there honor in that, too?”

Under Roman law, an executed criminal forfeited all his property, while a condemned man who took his own life retained the right to dispose of his possessions as he wishes. Petronius, to the end, remains a practical and respected member of his society. Weighing where those qualities ought to rank in a well-lived life is one of the opportunities Jesse Browner’s rewarding new novel provides.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com