Maybe Two out of Sixteen Pleasures

The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga has almost sixteen separate themes and they are not tightly woven together. After finishing the book and asking myself, what was his point or his message, why did he write it, I have to give equal if minimal weight to: the importance of art as life-defining; the attraction of a contemplative life over an erotic one; the false love of a foreign country (read Italy); the geographic dispersal of the American family leaving it rootless versus the generations long home in Abruzzi; etc., etc.

Hellenga is clever and reaches a couple of peak writing experience. I particularly liked the parallelism between peddling the Renaissance pornographic book bound into a religious tract and the Rota annulment trial, steeped in voyeuristic marital relations or the lack thereof. Especially when Postiglione buys fake decades old post cards from a store that caters to making forgeries specific to the requirements of Catholic law. At that point, the theme of religion vis a vis sex played its strongest.



But Margot, the female lead character, is wimpy, a mediocre bookbinder, lured and tempted more by the nuns she lives with while restoring artifacts destroyed by the flood of the Arno in Florence than she is by her series of men. Like the manual labor of drying soaked folios and resewing bindings, Margot seems more comfortable in the mechanics of sex, the sixteen illustrations, than in the emotional aspects of lust or love.

Both Margot and Postiglione are overaffected by trivial events: she "falls in love" seeing him bringing her a bouquet as he walks across the Plaza; he falls out of love when she takes him to a Chinese restaurant and he cannot master chopsticks. They part, he returns to his wife, she returns to her doldrums.