The Apprentice Lover: A Novel

About this book

A poet and biographer Jay Parini is also a novelist whose fiction has been acclaimed as "dazzli/ng " (Los Angeles Times) "achingly beautiful " (Washington Post) and "a subtle masterpiece" (John Bayley in the Times Literary Supplement). In his new novel The Apprentice Lover Parini evokes the gorgeous Mediterranean island of Capri during the summer of 1970 as the setting for a sensuous deeply affecting story of a young Americans coming into his own and reconciling himself with his past. When Alex Massolinis brother is killed in Vietnam he drops out of Columbia University and leaves his conservative family behind for Capri to become secretary to Rupert Grant a famous British novelist and poet who dominates the island like a latter-day Prospero. Alex soon finds himself ensnared in a web of love affairs friendships and rivalries within the eccentric community that inhabits the idyllic beauty of the isolated Italian island. Among that group are the selfish cunning and brilliant Rupert Grant; his wife Vera a charming and sophisticated social manipulator; the elusive Holly and the mysterious Marisa who act as Grants research assistants; the young philosophy student from the Sorbonne Patrice LaRue; and Father Aurelio who is desperate for parishioners. The Apprentice Lover traces a young Americans enchantment and disenchantment-with his American past with his new European mentor and with the various characters on an island famous for its characters. As Alex stumbles upon intrigues and secrets he tries to balance what others demand of him with his own nascent desires. His apprenticeship in love literature and life unfolds with a combination of Mediterranean clarity wry humor wit and emotional power that only a master of fiction could orchestrate.