Leading Men

February 1, 2019

A literary alternate history, this new work from Castellani (All This Talk of Love) deftly combines fact and fiction to reimagine the relationship between playwright Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo. It centers on their fictional 1953 trip to Portofino, Italy, to attend a party hosted by writer Truman Capote. There they meet American novelist John Horne Burns and a young Swedish woman, Anja Blomgren, whom Williams and Merlo take on as their project, introducing her to luminaries of the film industry. (In real life, Williams was in Italy at the time, working on the script of Luchiano Visconti's Senso.) Anja soon meets a Bergman-like Scandinavian director, and her acting career is underway. The chapters alternate among the Italian trip; Frank's dying in a New York hospital ten years later, hoping for a reconciliation with Williams; and elderly screen legend Anja Bloom, who is staging Williams's final play in a Provincetown, MA, bar in the 1990s. VERDICT This is a tale of love and loneliness, the personal costs of genius and its attendant fame, and of the ultimate, inconsolable pain of loss. In its depiction of Americans in Europe, its closest literary cousin might be F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2019
To the spate of novels investigating the lives of famous artists and their relationships with the people who loved them most, add this intriguing take on Tennessee Williams and his lover of 15 years, Frank Merlo.Nicknamed the Horse by Williams for his stocky build, Merlo was a man from a working-class Italian family in New Jersey who rose to elite echelons of society through his relationship with Williams, becoming friends with, among others, Anna Magnani and Truman Capote (whom neither he nor Williams cherished). Castellani's Merlo, with a heart that's "big and simple and practical," is the focus here. Merlo is fulfilled by his work for Williams---arranging the details of the scatterbrained playwright's life--but also plagued by doubts about his own purpose ("If Frank could not be the fountain, he could at least feel the spray," Castellani writes). In portions of the novel set in 1953, Castellani imagines that the couple meets a glamorous Swedish mother and daughter, "these fierce and delicate greyhounds, with their taut slender necks," the younger of whom, Anja Bloom, they take under their wings. She will become an international star known for her work in art house cinema, but her fame won't soften her "haunted and hard" heart. Castellani (The Art of Perspective, 2016) shuttles between 1953, when Williams was collaborating with Paul Bowles to write the screenplay for Luchino Visconti's Senso, and now, when Bloom's star has faded but she is still in possession of Williams' (imaginary) last creation, a terrible one-act play, Call It Joy, that he wrote to assuage his guilt for not visiting Merlo in the hospital in 1963 as he was dying of lung cancer. Will Bloom allow the play to be performed? In an ambitious act of ventriloquism, Castellani includes the entire script of the play here. There are only a few missteps in the novel; it is not clear, for example, why anyone would fall in love with the petty and cantankerous writer John Horne Burns.Humane, witty, and bold, this novel imagines the life of a loving but tortured couple.

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December 15, 2018
Inspired by the real-life relationship between Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, Castellani's (All This Talk of Love, 2013) fourth novel opens in Portofino, 1953. At a party thrown by Truman Capote, Tenn and Frank meet intriguing young Anja. They convince her to follow them back to Rome, where they'll set her on the path to becoming a star. Castellani unravels three threads: those auspicious, sun-soaked days in Italy; Frank in a Manhattan cancer ward, 10 years later; and present-day Anja, a reclusive widow hiding from her fame. Characterizations and mood drive this novel. While historical details about Tenn, his work, and his world bolster the story, it primarily belongs to Frank: a life preserver in person form, who never quite knows when to put his own interests first. When a new friend reminds Anja of her past life, she, like the author, grows determined to bring her old friends to life through art. With imagination and feeling, Castellani reconjures history to reveal the intricate dynamics?loving and passionate, selfless and devastating?among artists and those who nurture them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)