Hill Towns

A couple traveling through the hill towns of Italy find themselves and learn something about marriage on their journey

"Americans behave badly in Italy," observes a perspicacious character in Siddon's ( Colony ) latest, an evocative, gothic tale of the dark ties binding a long-married couple. Cat Gaillard's life was irrevocably marred at age five when a truck plowed into her hedonistic parents, who were making love on a bridge. Raised in a small, southern hill town at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains, Cat found safety within the rarified confines of its resident college and refused ever after to leave. Her agoraphobia entrances her husband Joe, a pedantic dean of English who revels in being Cat's strength and feels threatened when therapy frees her somewhat for a holiday abroad; they will roam across Italy as the unlikely companions of Joe's protege Colin and his new bride Maria. Other fellow travelers include Yolanda, a hilariously bitchy, oversexed Martha Stewart knockoff; Sam, a bluff, sweat-scented painter mesmerized by Cat; and his Machiavellian wife Ada, who will do anything to jumpstart Sam's creative motor. As a gritty, hot wind blows the group through Venice and into Tuscany, the hypocrisies cementing Cat's marriage are exposed. Siddons artfully conjures a violently seductive, sensual world peopled by characters boiling with elemental emotions: fear, lust, aching love. But the deliberately lyric cadences of her prose, though generally rich and enjoyable, are sometimes cloying and forced. $250,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild main selection; author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Siddons' last big commercial outing (Colony, 1992) was built along a New England-Southern axis. This time, she creates a passel of characters her fans will find reassuringly familiar, and then sends them far out of their ken--to Italy. Catherine Compton--a true Siddons woman in that she can whine engagingly--is from a tiny college town in Tennessee and has a macabre background: her mom and dad died while making love on a bridge. As a result, Cat grows up agoraphobic, refusing to leave the safe, idyllic little world of Trinity College, where her handsome Yankee husband, Joe Gaillard, teaches English. But when Joe's prot‚g‚, Colin Gerard, plans to get married in Italy, Cat faces her fears, books a flight, and--under the light of an Italian sun--finds everything different. Above all, Joe has a midlife crisis, sparked by the loss of his luggage and fanned by Ada Forrest, the wife of famous painter whom the Gaillards meet in Rome. Meanwhile, Sam Forrest takes a shine to Cat; her ``snub, narrow Renaissance look'' inspires him artistically, not to mention romantically. The two couples join the newlyweds on a honeymoon stomp across the boot, slurping bellinis at Florian's in Venice, marveling over Michelangelo's David in Florence, and finally holing up at a villa outside Siena. There, Sam reveals the portrait of Cat he's been working on, which portrays her as St. Theresa--though in sexual, not religious ecstasy. Joe is not amused, but the Gaillards will work things out before they head back to Tennessee, with their horizons expanded. Siddons's theme is the moral and psychological ambiguity that arises from American contact with the European other. Henry James did it better--with a whole lot more subtlety--but, still, Siddons's tried-and-true fans will be pleased. (First printing of 200,000; Literary Guild Dual Selection for September) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.