L'America

by Martha McPhee

In the brilliant Greek sunshine of a small Aegean island, Beth and Cesare meet—beginning a transformative love affair that spans two continents, two decades, and two lifetimes. Cesare is a privileged Italian boy, raised in a prosperous town where his family has lived for five hundred years; Beth, an ambitious American dreamer born to hippies and raised on a commune. The events of September 11 serve as a catalyst for the unfolding of their story, in which passion struggles against the inexorable force of patria.

The novel of the American in Europe has a long and lustrous pedigree. L’America adds to this lineage, an evocative portrait of the intersection between Europe and America, the old and the new, and the dizzying, life-changing power of first love.

Genres: Fiction, Romance, Contemporary

294 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2006

About the author

Martha McPhee graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine and received her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

She is the author of five novels: An Elegant Woman, Dear Money; L'America; Gorgeous Lies; and Bright Angel Time. Her work has been honored by a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Gorgeous Lies was a finalist for a National Book Award. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children, and teaches at Hofstra University.

Reviews

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the surface L'America is a love story, but it ends up being about class and national identity, and how both are hard to get around even for love. The writing style is rich and evocative, and the fact that we know from the start that it is not a "love conquers all" story lets you observe more closely the roots of their conflict. The two main characters are Beth, an American who grew up on a semi-commune in rural Pennsylvania (with some polish added in NY, NY), and Cesare, who is the privileged son of a wealthy family from Northern Italy. Neither are without flaw, and at some point you realize that the only thing that really kept the two apart was that they are both a bit selfish. But their rapturous meeting and their long drawn-out breakup are both told in fragments and time skips, interwoven with vignettes that illustrate their essential natures. You know that they are not meant to be. One element that struck me was the lost chances, which are especially poignant as we find out fairly early on that Beth dies in the the Towers on September 11. One character points out that only in this kind of out-of-scale tragedy do your loved ones get to see you die over and over again on TV. Both Beth and Cesare have a fascination for their beloved's culture (Beth ends up writing Italian cookbooks), but cannot get over their own background and expectations. Still their sometimes obsessive passion for each other ends up making you wistful and wishing they had taken the chance. That love still defined a huge part of their lives, even if it was ultimately untenable.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

the reader knows early on that this love affair is doomed, yet the story of cesare and beth is so compelling, you're willing to invest the time. lush language, beautiful descriptive passages. i want to go to italy and experience its romance and beauty!

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Study abroad, Italy, first loves, art history, idealized organic communes... if this book was aimed for a certain demographic, then I fell for it (doesn't hurt that the main character's name is Beth, either). But I did fall for this book. The story of an American meeting her destined love-of-her-life, an Italian heir, is easy to read and convincingly takes readers to Italy in years ranging from the Renaisannce to the seventies, and New York in the eighties to post-9/11 with stops in Greece and France. These are compelling characters whom you root for -- most of the time -- and author Martha McPhee isn't challenging readers with larger questions beyond true love and loss. (In fact, the characters are not challenged beyond this as, annoyingly, there's always a rich grandmother to finance any whim.) L'America is a pleasant way to enjoy a vicarous foreign love affair. I'll also give points to DesignWorks Group for the sexy book cover. When writing about Italy...

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'America by Martha McPhee has been the most profoundly moving book I have read so far this year. The story of an American woman and an Italian man who fall in love and never can be together, not because of some evil plot or debt of honor but because they both have dreams that cannot blend together, expectations from their families and cultures that hold them tight. The story starts with the man getting a letter from his ex-lover's husband letting him know that she has died. He remembers the beginning of their relationship from the giddy first days to the sad and bitter ending. As the book progresses the reader becomes more and more aware that this will never work. That they are doomed, not only to fail in this love but to also never be able to fully leave it behind. This was a story that hurts to read but is beautiful in the telling.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure about this one, the writing is confusing at time. I picked up the book because the premise seemed to make for such a good story. An American girl falls her Italian friends love interest while on vacation in Greece. The book is confusing because the person telling the story keeps changing without warning. I was going to put it down around page 30, I hope I'm not going to regret that!


So I kept reading and I'm not happy that I spent so much time reading this book. I'm standing behind the premise of the book which was very good, and I really liked the side stories. The book was just so slow and not in an enjoyable long stroll on the beach kind of way. Nope, just SLOW and dull at times. I wanted to like this book so much, it just kept falling down when I thought it was going to get up and go.

I would read something else by this author because I loved her ideas.

[Geoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, I’m sad I didn’t like this as much as I thought I would. Seriously, I’ve given it the lowest rating of the year so far. I bought it in one of my bulk buys at the 2011 Boston Book festival and haven’t thought of it since. It came up on my list when I used random.org to select my next book.

Even though I finished it, I just could not invest in this book, and that’s never a good sign. It started off slow, and thankfully did pick up a good bit, but still finished slow. Seriously go read the paragraph long sentence that was the final sentence of the novel. Not fun.

Click here to continue reading on my blog The Oddness of Moving Things.

[Mary-Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a not-so-sweeping love epic. I picked it up because the story is set in Greece, Italy, France, U.S. etc, and I read to experience things I cannot in my everyday. Having said that, I never really was grabbed by the story. It was difficult to read...unemotional. It's the kind of book that I might try again. Afterall, the first time I read The English Patient I just did not like it, the next 3 times I read it, I fell in love with it completely. So maybe I just need to give it another try.

[Carly Mae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered this book on my own. It is probably one of the best books I've read in a few years. It's one of those that really spoke to me, but I couldn't tell you why or how without some time to think about it. It was just so wonderfully painful, tragic through and through.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long distance love story for the young at heart.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Relived my brief life in Italy and was gripped throughout by the great writing and story.

[Melanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. You know the ending from the beginning. I kept reading thinking that there must be something more...there wasn't.

[Heather Pehnec · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely writing - evokes and connects time, place, identity and emotion throughout. The travelogue-esque nature of it will satisfy wanderlust if unable to travel at the moment!

[Marne Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a while to get my bearings with this book, which weaves in and out of time in the same way that Kazuo Ishiguro's novels do. This is a very simple story on the surface, about an American girl and Italian boy who meet while vacationing in Greece in 1982. They try very hard for years to make their relationship work, without ever completely succeeding. It is, as I said, a simple love story, but it's a good one, and anyone who has had a love that didn't quite work out should be able to relate to all the ups and downs.

However, it's much more than just a story of a tragic love. Along the way we learn all kinds of things about Italian food (as well as the food of many other cultures), about daily life in Italy and New York City in the 80's and 90's, and also about what life on a commune in upstate New York is really like. McPhee's writing is sumptuous, if never straightforward. I think the book this reminded me of the most was Crescent. Four years later, I still haven't completely recovered from that book, and I imagine I'll end up feeling the same way about this one.

[Spicy Brycey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book put me in such a reading slump. My therapist recommended this book to me and said it was her favorite book. That being said, she is not a reader and so I didn’t have high hopes to begin with. Normally I don’t find it to be such a chore to finish a book.

[Pat Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written; heartbreaking story of enduring love.

[Cher Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more. At times it was quite interesting and insightful, rich and surprising. Some of the settings were quite unusual, and the author explored cultural depths and nuances skillfully. On the other hand, she crammed perhaps too many unusual characters and places in the novel, and they didn't always come to life. Some of the quirky characters seemed either like an author's invention, or perhaps descriptions of people she'd really known who she tried to fit into the fiction. I finished it eventually and was glad I did. I think I would have liked it much more if she'd just told the story in chronological order and not kept jumping into the future or past. I had a hard time enjoying the "present "adventures of a character when there would be an aside in telling us how the character had died young, etc. The timeline was all over the place, and I don't see why that editorial decision was made.

[liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I completely adored McPhee's first novel, "Bright Angel Time." I think it has my absolute favorite opening paragraph of any book I've ever read. And so I was excited to see that her latest is about Italy. She's one of those writers who amazes me with the things she's able to observe about people (how does one disconnect oneself so successfully?). The subject matter was a little bit difficult, though -- it's about two people, an American girl and Italian boy, who are the loves of each other's lives and don't stay together (focussing on the American). Still good.

[June · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do not judge a book by the stars I give. I liked the book a lot, but I didn't love it. I think the idea of reconciling romance and love with love of country and culture is a really interesting one that the author developed well. But I also feel that Beth's culture and country is not typically American because of her upbringing in a hippie commune. I felt like that context and childhood was so different that it could have been a story in itself, in which case the conflict with Italy and Ceasare seemed almost irrelevant or too much to cover in one book.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was difficult to rate. I really wanted to like this book, and I did love parts of it. But I was extremely bored by others. The story itself is good (Italy! Doomed love affair!) but told in a detached ("dear reader") way so it can be difficult to care about the characters. Plus, the book jumps all over the place, time-wise. I don't instinctively have a problem with this (I loved Time Traveler's Wife), but I don't think it works so well here, partly because big chunks of Cesare's life are left out.

[Bookmarks Magazine]

Like Henry James, Martha McPhee, author of Bright Angel Time and the National Book Award?nominated Gorgeous Lies, asks big questions about European tradition and American "newness," while offering an absorbing account of first love. Critics praised McPhee's superb writing, pitch-perfect dialogue, and flesh-and-blood characters. (Only Michiko Kakutani asked why readers should care about such selfish and stubborn creations.) L'America circles around itself in a layered, multidecade narrative, which, while adding depth to the story, also diminishes the drama. Some clich_

[Beth · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a crap book.

I thought this would be so good - a love story about an American girl who meets an Italian boy while both are on holiday in Greece. What could go wrong?

Everything. This author did a terrible job of telling the story. The point of view changes constantly, there are random and frequent changes in continuity, way too many boring storylines, and not enough about the main characters. Why couldn't she just tell a linear story about Beth and Cesare, and how they fell in love, what their obstacles were, and how they were resolved? It would have been so much better.

[Rachel Whelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upon initial read I was impressed with the writing style. The longer I've processed L'America, the more the layers have unfurled and lingered. Class, history, misunderstandings, culture. Don't be fooled by the suggestive cover: this isn't a love story, and there isn't a happy ending. L'America is a grand odyssey of romance and culture, told in a syntactically innovative merge of past-present-futute. Stylistically it might not appeal to everyone, but I felt the plot and the disruptions in Beth and Cesare's life's seemed realistic enough to propel the action.

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't expect to like this novel as much as I did. But I found its story and characters engrossing, extremely well written (especially considering it could have fallen into many clichés) and, more than that, I felt that it showed the subtle differences that can divide Europeans and Americans in a very intelligent way. It's also quite moving.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful and complicated love affair that spans two continents, two decades. The story of Beth a free thinking North American, raised in an unusual way and always looking for adventures, and Cesare, from a old and wealthy Italian family steeped in tradition.He has dreams of his own of what could be. So well written, it kept me reading and not wanting it to end.

[Jeri Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved/hated this book. Loved the characters and prose, but did not like the timeline jumping backward and forward. I have read books before, using this technique and enjoyed them, but found it be be confusing here. I almost stopped reading it early on, but after reading other's positive reviews, I decided to stick with it. And I'm glad I did!

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written love story between an American woman and an Italian man. I'm not sure I like the style as it skips around a lot, although I'm also not sure I would've liked the book as much as I did if it was told straight through. Definitely worth your time, though, as McPhee is a lovely writer.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I enjoyed the writing style, the settings and the story which is perhaps more realistic than many love stories (except maybe for the extended European vacations). I finished the book last night but find myself thinking about the thought-provoking ending today.

[Hollie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a profound coming of age story that examines the endurance and tribulations of love, its trials and consequences, passion vs tradition, and so much more. One can acutely experience the emotions of the characters, and roller-coaster ride that McPhee creates for these lovers.

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't finish this book. It was boring, it kept switching points of view randomly, it went in long tangents that had nothing to do with the story. I just couldn't finish it. I've been trying to read this thing for weeks and I finally give up.

[Shelley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found the writing incredibly pretentious, but maybe I'm just an unsophisticated plebeian.