The Apprentice Lover

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"Love the questions... that lie inside you." - Rated
Do not be misled by the "moony" cover art, the title, or the fact that this is sometimes described as a coming-of-age novel--it is not romantic, whimsical, or lightweight. Instead, it is a meticulously crafted, mature novel which illuminates the major themes and issues which thoughtful men and women confront throughout their lives. Elegantly written and emotionally involving, it is one of the best--and most unsettling--novels I've read in a long time.

Alex Massolini, aged 22, is a budding poet and student of classics in 1970, when he drops out of Columbia because he no longer "cared a feather about the fate of Rome or its [Gallic wars]...My only brother, Nicky, had been killed in Vietnam." Taking a job as a secretary to Rupert Grant, a well-known Scottish writer living on Capri, Alex faces his own, more subtle wars as he tries to discover who he is and what he believes, while living in Grant's turbulent household and observing his decadent lifestyle. Grant is manipulative, vindictive, and ego-driven, often abusive to his wife and two young female assistants. As his resentment of Grant grows, Alex finds himself in a quandary, since he admires Grant's writing, loves meeting his friends--W.H.Auden, Graham Greene, and Gore Vidal, among others--and hopes Grant will become a mentor for him in his own writing.

Themes of love and loss, good and evil, free will and obligation, and war and its aftermath pervade the novel as Alex tries to understand himself, the creative life, and the sacrifices artists make for it. Issues of sexuality, religion, politics, philosophy, and even economics come into play for Alex, and Parini widens the perspective and gives universality to these themes and issues by juxtaposing, throughout, the letters which Alex's estranged brother Nicky has sent him from Vietnam. This is a beautifully realized, patiently designed, and maturely confident novel, by an author who himself illustrates a quotation by Rilke in the book: "Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree that does not force its sap but stands confident in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer." For this author, summer has arrived. Mary Whipple