THE ARCHITECT OF NEW YORK

Very lightly fictionalized life of a Spanish-born architect who had his greatest success in the U.S.

We meet Rafael Guastavino (1842-1908) on May 11, 1881, when, barely a month after their arrival in New York, his 9-year-old son, Rafael Jr., watches as his mother tells her philandering mate she’s going back to Barcelona. The adult Rafael Jr. is designing the dome of St. John the Divine as he begins his recollections of his father’s complicated personal and professional lives, which include two marriages (neither of them to Rafael Jr.’s mother) and some simultaneous affairs. “I could not be without a woman in my life,” Guastavino tells his son to excuse his various infidelities, which are so poorly managed that he’s inevitably found out. He’s equally feckless in his financial affairs, going bankrupt on several occasions despite a growing reputation based on his innovative vault designs, which are fireproof and lighter than anything American architects have seen. Rafael Jr. was intimately involved in his father’s work even before he left school at 15 to apprentice in the business, and his descriptions of Guastavino’s contributions to the Boston Public Library, the Grand Central Oyster Bar, Manhattan’s City Hall subway station, Boston’s Christian Science mother church, and other iconic buildings are the most engaging parts of the book. The stop-and-start way readers learn about Guastavino’s past, which mirrors the way Rafael Jr. pried the details from his secretive father, is one of the few reasons to consider this a novel, along with the son’s less-than-riveting musings on how their relationship evolved over time. Moro’s previous book along these lines, a “dramatized biography” of Sonia Gandhi called The Red Sari, prompted an official protest from the Indian National Congress party after it was published in Spain in 2008; this slow-moving successor is unlikely to stir that much attention.

Potentially of some interest to architecture buffs, not so much to fiction readers.