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Young Father Maurice Lamoreaux’s emotional shell breaks open to the feminine beauty of Italy’s sister cities—Rome, Florence, and Venice—when he consents to accompany an ex-student and his father on a holiday tour. Jim’s wife left him and his son Cam just before the family vacation, and Jim feels Father Maurice will be a good companion for Cam at this confusing juncture in their lives. Cam is not only grappling with his mother’s sudden absence but also with his sexual identity as a young gay man about to enter college. Enthralled by his perception of the three sister cities as women who share their secrets with him, Father Maurice is also drawn to Isabelle, a perceptive young photographer and dominatrix with a dark past who understands the unexplored regions of the clergyman’s life. Each broken member of the tour experiences what these cities offer in the way of solace and transformation, bolstered by Italy’s delicious cuisine and fine wine.
Zultowski’s lush, lyrical prose offers observations that can only emerge from the philosophical exploration of metaphor and poetics. He manages to keep the story meandering in a relaxed, though cerebral, way as the tourists observe one another while experiencing the discretely different cities. The emotional stew created between the lines is anything but bland or sunny. The story arc rises like steam from a slow-cooking kettle until the boiling point of a perhaps inevitable denouement explodes. The travelers all experience personal epiphanies as people often do when leaving their home country behind, but only Jim seems to lose his way with his unresolved anger toward his wife and his deep discomfort with Cam’s blooming sexuality. The novel is at once a coming-of-age story, a family drama, and a suspenseful spiritual mystery that explores faith, love, and physical passion.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review