February 12, 2006
Of courtesans and crazed consumers
In the Company of the Courtesan
By Sarah Dunant
Random House, 371 pp., $23.95
The Night Journal
By Elizabeth Crook
Viking, 464 pp., $24.95
Rattled
By Debra Galant
St. Martin's, 256 pages, $21.95
The first of these entertaining novels is set in a vividly re-created 16th-century Venice. The second uses events that occurred in late 19th-century New Mexico to unravel a family mystery. The third is a dead-on satire of rampant consumerism in 21st-century New Jersey.
The hair-raising opening of Sarah Dunant's ''In the Company of the Courtesan" is a victim's-eye view of the bloody sack of Rome in 1527 by Spanish and German armies. ''It took longer than we thought for them to get to us. But then rape and pillage is a time-consuming business, and there were so many and so much to get through," recalls Bucino Teodoldi, a resourceful dwarf employed by Fiammetta Bianchini, Rome's most celebrated courtesan.
After Fiammetta is wounded and shorn of her hair by German camp followers, she and Bucino escape Rome with nothing but a handful of hastily swallowed jewels. They make their way to Venice, then at the height of its power and prosperity. Bucino -- servant, friend, pimp, pet -- becomes her business partner. With the help of La Draga, a fey blind healer suspected of being a witch, Fiammetta recovers her looks and her wit.
In Bucino, Dunant has brought to life an unconventional narrator, a passionate, intelligent man with the relentlessly observant eye of an outsider. Fiammetta too is an anomaly, a prostitute as famous for her intellect as her beauty and sexual skills. Their curious partnership is tested by temptation, betrayal, and love. Dunant's research informs every line, but it never overwhelms her spellbinding writing. She weaves in historical figures, as she did in ''The Birth of Venus." Here she uses the artist Titian and Pietro Aretino, a writer of both religious works and pornography.
Venice isn't just a backdrop in this story; in many ways it is the story. Bucino describes the cosmopolitan port in all its splendor and squalor. At first he hates the city, but he can't help but be seduced by its vitality. As the courtesan's confidant he has a window on the ruling hierarchy, the rich, influential men who frequent her house, leaders in politics, religion, business, and the arts. Dunant uses Bucino to draw a seductive portrait of Venice at a moment when it was the most vibrant trading center in the Western world.
The mother-daughter relationship, that reliable source of literary inspiration, is the framework on which Elizabeth Crook has built her ambitious, interesting novel ''The Night Journal." Like so many other mother-daughter stories, this one is a lot more complicated than it first appears, encompassing historical fiction, mystery, and romance.
Meg Mabry, 37, single, a water-treatment engineer, reluctantly agrees to accompany her cranky grandmother Claudia Bass, known as Bassie, on a trip back to the older woman's childhood home in New Mexico. Archeologists are digging up Dog Hill on the old family property, and Bassie insists she wants to retrieve the bones of the family dogs buried there.
Bassie has made a distinguished career as a historian by editing, publishing, and promoting the journals written by her mother, Hannah, who came west from Chicago and worked as a waitress at the Metropole, a grand hotel in Las Vegas. She began her journals in 1891, when she was 21, and wrote until her death from tuberculosis 10 years later. Excerpts from the diaries are interspersed throughout the novel -- lively, frank, personal observations, as well as her impressions of the territory in the late 19th century, its politics, commerce, and customs, the discord among Mexicans, Americans, and Native Americans.
As a way of distancing herself from her overpowering grandmother and the weight of family history, Meg has made a point of not reading Hannah's famous journals. But on a rainy night early in the trip she picks up a boxed paperback set of the three books in a hotel lobby and grudgingly begins reading them. She keeps reading, with growing interest. When Jim Layton, the archeologist excavating Dog Hill, literally unearths a family secret that calls into question the integrity of the journals, Meg is able to deduce the truth about Hannah and Bassie.
Debra Galant pays Carl Hiaasen the sincerest form of flattery in ''Rattled," a comic novel set among McMansion dwellers in a newly developed corner of rural New Jersey, ''country but not too country. Barns, horses, things like that -- but there was also a new mall anchored by Bloomingdale's and Saks."
Her writing style resembles Hiaasen's, and some of her themes are similar. ''Rattled" has environmental exploitation, a greedy and crooked developer, self-satisfied suburbanites, disgruntled natives. But instead of a sadder-but-wiser hero, Galant has placed a priceless anti-heroine at the center of this very funny send-up of compulsive consuming and moral rot.
Status-mad Heather Peters has at last achieved her dream house in Galapagos Estates, and she isn't about to let a bunch of endangered rattlesnakes get in her way. Blond and perky Heather is a human steamroller. She treats lawyer husband Kevin like an ATM, and seems to think their troubled 8-year old son Connor's only role in life is to make her look like the perfect mother. When a timber rattlesnake appears uninvited on her patio, the handyman, local egg farmer Harlan White, bashes in its head on Heather's orders and hides the corpse in the garage. Unfortunately for Heather, the snake was wearing a radio transmitter, and soon town conservation officer Agnes Sebastian is at the door accusing Heather of serpenticide involving an endangered species. When Heather is thrown in jail overnight, her case becomes a media sensation, pitting her neighbors against animal-rights activists and raising questions about the business practices of sleazy developer Jack Barstad. Galant has written a sharp, wickedly amusing, up-to-the-minute satire.
Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction. DIANE WHITE
