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Book Review

Antonello's Lion

INCORPORATING WRITING, V, No. 3 (2006)

Reviewed by G. P. Kennedy

After being trapped into impregnating his lesbian artist girlfriend, Solomon, a New York Jewish art historian, heads to Sicily to track down a lost masterpiece of St. Francis of Assisi by Antonello da Messina. Thirty-seven years later, in the summer of 2001, Nathan, the son he never knew, begins a similar quest, less interested in the artwork using it only as a means to retrace his father's footsteps. What transpires is a double picaresque written with occasional flair and a not insignificant degree of humour whose denouement offers the tired and testing 'more than they bargined for'.

Imagine if you will that Dan Brown sets himself the challenge of an A.S. Byatt novel but that he cannot wrest himself from his art sleuth oeuvre. Throw in some Marquezian magic realism and Humanist theory and there you have it.

The result, you might reasonably imagine, would be a ham-fisted capanata of styles. Thus is Antellello's Lion. Whilst Katz will engage you with sopra-authorataive Italian vistas and mouth-watering piscatorial feasts, his appalling use of metaphor and simile may leave you shy of ever again indulging in buffalo mozzarella. Literature does not deserve to have foisted upon it such formaggio-laden stylings as, 'Anger lay on his heart like a shroud' and pecorino-laced musings like 'Had he forgotten what she looked like? Had she just been part of a dream?'

The real issue with this book is the epilogue, PSSST! Katz indulges in an extended essay on 9/11 and its cataclysmic effects on the American psyche. Indeed Nathan is so perturbed after his atypically heroic rescue efforts during the 9/11 attacks that he moves to Colorado forthwith.

Essentially Katz argues that 9/11 represents the ultimate manifestation of the failure of Humanism, tacitly justifying the lurch to jingoistic and xenophobic insularity in the States since 2001. In so doing he employs the most crass sentimentalism, referring to New York as, 'the greatest experiment in pluralism ever known to the world', and the perpetrators of 9/11 as, 'those self-righteous maniacs who would see only the one narrow path to the dogma they call truth'.

Ultimately Antenello's Lion fails to 'not easily leave the mind', as Katz wishes, leaving only an intaglio of a good yarn marred by the author's fetishism.