MICHELANGELO AT MIDLIFE

An American man travels to Italy after a series of personal catastrophes to find answers in a work by Michelangelo in Openshaw’s novel.

Sam’s life spirals into disaster after his wife, Anabel, is diagnosed with cancer, reeling from a “calamitous Tiny Lump, and the rushing river of misery that followed.” His father dies of illness, his mother descends into dementia, and Anabel files for divorce, exiling him from the house and estranging him from their daughter, Emmi. Homeless and emotionally distraught, Sam heads to Florence in search of work—he’s a veteran tour guide—and Michelangelo’s Tomb of Pope Julius II, an artistic masterpiece he quixotically turns to for guidance: “Maybe if I focus on the Tomb, I can get myself back on track.” He begins to spend a lot of time with Nikki, his beautiful Italian former assistant and fellow admirer of Michelangelo, for whom he develops a deep romantic affection. The author deftly relates two parallel tales: Sam’s struggle to fix his battered life and the extraordinary feat of constructing Michelangelo’s “ridiculously audacious Tomb,” which took 40 terrible years to complete. The thematic connection between the two storylines, conveyed with impressive emotional poignancy, is the crisis of middle age: the mortal battle against irrepressible time. “The arrow of Time was streaking like a rocket across the sky, leaving a vapor trail. I could see the entire arc of a human life in a single glance, in stark relief against the backdrop of non-existence. And I could see exactly where I was on that arc.”

Despite the gravity of Sam’s troubles, Openshaw largely keeps this a lighthearted tale, filled with humor and tinged with an ironic acknowledgement of the travails of life. The novel is just as much about Michelangelo, whose history is expertly detailed, and includes gorgeous color photography of Italy and its artistic treasures. The character of Sam is too informed by formulaic clichés—he’s the artist who finds himself bedeviled by domestic obligations and the drudgery of work, a “polar bear in a tropical paradise, an artist in suburbia.” Similarly, the prose can feel a bit stale—here Sam wrestles with the opposing demands of passion and reason: “Give up, says Reason. You can’t undo the past. It’s irretrievable. The vase is shattered. The Artist is an idiot. Your phoenix is dead. But then comes my Heart—my stupid Heart! Try as I might, my Heart always has to have the last word and always ‘conquers’ my Reason. You can’t change the past, says my Heart, but you can’t run from it either.” These half-baked cliches and greeting-card sentiments are at best banal, at worst intellectually condescending. Fortunately, they do not sabotage the novel as a whole, which remains a frolicsome adventure story told with intelligence, if occasionally too earnestly. This is an entertaining treat, especially for art lovers and wanderlust-afflicted travelers looking for a breezy read.

A delightful combination of art history and light drama.