Venice

The comic novelist Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Less, a chronicle of the longings and humiliations of modern life. But now, he suspects, we’d all like an escape. ‘Whatever happened to the charm novel?’ he asks in his new outing, thinking of the lighter works of Nancy Mitford and Graham Greene. Since they are apparently out of fashion, he has decided to write his own. Villa Coco follows a young American archivist, hired to catalogue the antiques in Tuscany of an aged baronessa, known to her friends as ‘Coco’, only to find himself drawn into increasingly absurd adventures instead. He arrives in late summer, with all the American fantasies of Italy in tow: ‘A confection of movies and food... pasta and accordions and Leonardo and cheese.

Jan Morris was driven by almost super-human levels of energy and ambition, producing more than 40 books as well as news and travel articles, introductions, interviews, reviews and essays, travelling incessantly and taking on every job that was offered. That’s as far as I can go without a pronoun, because of course Morris’s life is divided into two parts. For the first half he was James, for the second she was Jan. James Morris was born in 1926, aware from early on that she was female, trapped in a male body. The transition to Jan, made in the early 1970s, remains at the heart of our fascination with Morris.

If Carlo Scarpa were as well known as Le Corbusier, modernism might not be so reviled. This architetto poeta grew up in Vicenza, whose 21 buildings by Palladio surely had a formative influence on his fast- evolving artistic intelligence. Scarpa studied building design at university, but, instinctively disobedient, never bothered with a licence to practise as an architect. So connected was he to his native territory that when Frank Lloyd Wright first visited Venice in 1951 he insisted on Scarpa being his guide. Most of Scarpa’s working life was spent in the Veneto, but he died in 1978, aged 72, in Sendai, Japan, after falling down a flight of concrete stairs. This added his own distinctive chapter to the story of curious deaths of great architects.

‘I am by trade a man of letters,’ Evelyn Dolman tells us as the curtain rises on Venetian Vespers. ‘I had a middling reputation in the period coming to be known, in our increasingly Frenchified age, as the fin de siècle, that is, the 1890s.’ If his writing mostly appears in the review sections, his marriage to Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of an American oil baron, is front-page stuff. But Laura has proved to be a distant, phantasmal partner. Even during the Dolmans’ sole night of physical intimacy, ‘it was as if, clasping me to her breast, she were at the same time looking aside and past my shoulder’. It moreover transpires that T. Willard Rensselaer, dead in mysterious circumstances, has cut his daughter out of his will.

Joad Raymond Wren’s ambitious history of early modern European news, capacious in structure, monumental in volume, is named for a witticism by John Earle (c.1601-65). The author of Microcosmography, a compilation of satirical ‘characters’ whose obvious modern heir is Victoria Mather’s ‘Social Stereotypes’, was arguably the funniest member of mid-17th century England’s most likeable clique, the Great Tew Circle. Wren more than once returns to Microcosmography’s comparison of the nave of St Paul’s, where London’s freshest newsletters were to be procured, with the commercial buzz of the Royal Exchange, with news replacing goods and hard cash as a potentially fruitful alternative currency.

In our age of cosmetic fantasy, a dramatic love story between two bespectacled art historians sounds implausible. But add in the Montague-Capulet effect of the Iron Curtain, along with a fearless Russian heroine who proved that love can conquer every barrier, and you have an enchanting tale: a completely true one, beautifully written by the art historian and novelist Iain Pears, the author of An Instance of the Fingerpost among many other books. Pears, who had been a pupil of Francis Haskell, began to visit his former tutor’s widow Larissa Salmina on a regular basis after 2000. He soon realised from odd remarks just how extraordinary their lives had been. He pointed to a photograph of a boy in naval uniform. ‘Ah,’ Larissa replied, ‘that’s my cousin. He was eaten by a bear.

Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, ‘no one “came out” except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner’, he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of 12, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested. But it may account for the determined frankness with which he has treated sex in both his fiction and memoirs. For an author who came of age in pre-liberation America, erotic candour has always been a political act, at least in part – never merely profligate.

The latest book from Tracy Chevalier, author of 11 novels, including the bestselling Girl with a Pearl Earring, tells the captivating story of Orsola Rosso, whom we first encounter in 1486 as a young girl on Murano, the glassmakers’ island in the Venetian lagoon. Within a few pages, her father, the maestro at the family’s workshop, is dramatically killed by a shard of glass flying ‘like a hot dart straight into his neck’. Orsola’s lazy, impetuous brother Marco, less skilful than their father, must take over, but orders soon begin to dwindle. How will Orsola help her family recover and prosper?