Customer Reviews

The Bellini Madonna: A Novel

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At first, I thought that I had strayed into a novel by James Hamilton-Paterson (`Cooking with Fernet Branca' etc.), but I soon realized that Ms Lowry strove for much more than flippancy and was busy worshipping at the altar of a much grander deity called James, i.e., Henry James.

Thus, the book comes with much that endears Henry James to some and makes him loathsome to others, i.e., exquisitely crafted, though at times enervatingly oblique or even pretentious prose and a plot that unfolds at the utmost leisure and at times seems to be more or less treading water. There is, of course, something very un-Jamesian about the generous helpings of sex; healthy reminders that we live in a age of fewer inhibitions; though I could well have done without another variation on the perennial evergreen of Roman catholic clerics abusing children.

And though I was soon aware that the epithet`thriller' used in one of the rave reviews on the blurb is wildly off the mark, I would have wished for something more of a surprise in the course of the book's denouement. On the other hand, the atmosphere of gloom and failure pervading the last pages is undeniably impressive.

Set aside the impossible length of the book, the endless self-flagellation of the narrator, and his implausible failure to find the Bellini Madonna he set out to discover. Lowry never makes it clear just why he should hate himself as he does. The only possible answer is thrown in at the last minute -- unfair to readers who have waded through 300+ plus pages thinking the narrative is going somewhere.

A thoroughly unlikable protagonist visits an unlikable country estate inhabited by unlikable people, looking for a lost masterpiece. The prose is deft, but way too dense. Too much detail obscures the plot, making the reading a chore. All that work for a rather unpleasant story with an unsatisfying ending. Was quite glad to be done with it.

In September of 1506, or so the story goes, Albrecht Durer, the famed German artist, writes a letter to a friend regarding a visit on his second trip to Italy to the workshops of Giovanni Bellini. He found the Old Master in his workshop painting a very different and startling Madonna, a last aging Madonna. She seems weary and tired stripped of her religious gildings, sitting with an empty lap.

Enter Thomas Lynch, a quirky art historian with a doctorate on Bellini altarpieces, former professor of fine arts at a small Vermont College, now middle-aged. He has been searching for this last and lost Bellini for ten years. Lynch has found in a 1972 catalog a minor Victorian art collector, one James Roper VI, whose Italian wife has inherited an uncataloged Madonna attributed to the workshop of Bellini; he wrangles an invitation to Mawle, the 17th century manor home in the Berkshires of the present-day Ropers. Most of the story centers at Mawle. We meet Maddalena, the often-absent mistress of the house: her daughter Anna, a free spirit, a young girl named Vicky, a second cousin, twice removed from the Italian side of the family; a yokel gardener who pries bottle top with his front teeth.

When he's not reclining on a deck chair on the south lawn in a "calf-length maroon paisley dressing gown with corded waist and starched black cuffs," Lynch searches the large and rambling mansion for the lost Bellini. He finds Roper's diary revealing a trip to Asolo in 1889 in a trunk in a small dressing room; Anna gives him the family Bible. There are many well-written fantasy scenes provoked by Roper's Italian remembrances.

Elizabeth Lowry's debut novel, THE BELLINI MADONNA needs a bit of editing. If we delete Lynch's childhood dalliance with a Catholic priest, wash out Anna's mouth with soap, and remove most of Lynch's lecherous thoughts, we'll have a pretty decent lost art mystery. Lowry has a tremendous vocabulary and an immense grasp of the Italian fin de sicle period of the 19th century.

Oh, the recipe for roast asparagus is in the hardcover edition, page 249.

I loved this book and it stayed with me a long time after I'd finished it. It wasn't always an easy read but that was kind of the point - I kept feeling that the style was challenging me to look at how it was written, and by doing this it was making a statement about how we see things and describe them - about art. I also felt it was definitely trying to challenge Gothic conventions, invoke the Gothic genre and then kind of tease us with it, pull the rug from under our feet, and I liked the cleverness of that.

The characters were often grotesque but that was part of the whole effect. The narrator, Tom Lynch, was really intriguing. At first I found him off-putting, but as the story went along I could see his scars and what made him the way he was, and by the end he had totally won me over. That was quite something for the author to pull off I thought. I found Anna, the girl he loves, tragic but also very funny and the dialogue between them very well handled. The mix of comedy and tragedy throughout the book was actually both strange and amazingly moving. I also enjoyed the evil mother, Madalena, and kept wishing she would come back.

This book actually disturbed me quite a lot because its emotions kept shifting around and I had to keep revising my view of the characters, and in that way it's a lot like life. It's a sophisticated read, a bit special, definitely not a beach book!

(3.5 stars) Writing a confession and an apology to Anna Roper, and asking the reader to be judge and jury for his crimes, former professor Thomas Joseph Lynch, a fifty-year-old art historian, describes his recent three-week stay at Mawle, a crumbling British country estate which has been in the Roper family for generations. Lynch, fired from his job at a Vermont college for the sexual abuse of a student, suffers every day from DTs, and for the past ten years he has been on the trail of an undiscovered Bellini Madonna, which he believes is at Mawle, Anna Roper's country home. A colleague, Professor Ludovico Puppi, is also looking for the same painting.

Mawle is as unkempt as the protagonist. Crumbling, uncared for, and lacking in modern amenities, it is a leaking mausoleum, with secret passageways, hidden rooms, and second rate paintings which Lynch is supposed to be cataloging. Anna Roper, the young owner, shows far more interest in the burly gardener than in Lynch, to whom she seems to be "an empty vessel." Vicky, a sad and lonely child of unknown parentage, also lives at Mawle. As Lynch prowls the estate, he uncovers a diary written in 1889 by James Roper, the man he believes carried the Bellini out of Italy to Mawle. Lynch's obsession with finding the lost masterpiece becomes the driving force of his life.

The characters in this novel are unlikable, sometimes repulsive, and uniformly dishonest, both about their lives and about their emotions. The narrator, Lynch, tells his story in heavy, overwrought prose, with as many adjectives in a paragraph as most writers include in a chapter, and the reader sees that while he is a fine observer of natural details and has a great sensitivity to vocabulary and unique imagery, his reactions are largely mechanical (and "aesthetic"), rather than genuinely emotional. The complexities and complications of Lynch's search, which become the novel's plot, are hidden within this mass of detail, and the reader must work to discover it. It is not until the last fifty pages that the action picks up and the characters begin to become human.

Though this debut novel contains elements which suggest that this is could be a gothic romp and a satire of the "aesthetic life," it is uneven. The gothic atmosphere is shattered when a female character casually utters modern obscenities, when a place is likened to a "perverse pop-up book," and when a character is told to "play ball." The "aesthetes" and academics here are so limited that it is difficult to find them humorous. As Lynch himself confesses: "I am no longer always even sure whose story I am supposed to be telling. Oh, mine, naturally, but for the first time in my life I wonder what it's worth." n Mary Whipple