In the brilliant Greek sunshine of a small Aegean island, Beth
and Cesare meetbeginning 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. LAmerica 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.
關於作者：
MARTHA McPHEEs novel Gorgeous Lies was a
National Book Award Finalist. She is the recipient of fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She teaches at Hofstra University
and lives in New York.
內容試閱：
Two Exquisite Pain This is an excerpt from Chapter Two of
LAmerica by Martha McPhee She called him from phone booths all
across America, standing at the edges of lonely gas stations by the
sides of those long endless roads, while James waited patiently in
the car, believing that she was only calling home. It was her
grandmothers car, a black Lincoln boat with a gold inscription on
the dashboard reading Mrs. Oliver Carter Brandt, III. She would
watch the car lounging heavily in the hot summer sun. She would
shut her eyes and wish that she could emerge from the booth as some
sort of Superwoman and transform the world, wish that it were
Cesare behind the wheel, acting the cowboy or Jimmy Dean, arm
draped easily over the back of the long front seat the way he liked
to do, his black-framed sunglasses resting on the bridge of his
nose. He had loved driving the car, the sheer size of it, cruising
the canyons of New York City, sailing the wide highways. The static
crackled through the international line connecting them, reminding
her of the distance. Even so she could hear his voice clearly, his
accent bringing back all of Italy so that it seemed she was headed
toward him, not away. It was a dare, that was all, this trip west.
She hardly knew James. She was twenty-three years old and had just
graduated from college. In the beginning the conversations were the
same. Are you coming? Cesare would ask. You know Im not, she would
say, trying on toughness. You are, hed respond with his cool
confidence a confidence that loved the conditional tense, the if
that could make all possible. It was by now that she was supposed
to have gone to Italy to marry him. At Christmas, however, Cesare
had revealed an infidelity, giving Beth a green silk hat that a
milliner lover of his had made. It was an exquisite hat, an oval
pillbox with gentle tiers. Beth knew its entire story as she opened
it, knew as well that the woman would ultimately be insignificant.
She called him first from the outskirts of Hazelville, a little
town outside of Pittsburgh that James had wanted to visit because
he had been born there. James had been in Beths graduating class at
New York University, a good boy who detasseled corn as a kid, a
geologist in the making whose subject was America, a poet at heart.
Beth had been impatient with the sentimental notion of the detour
to his birthplace. But she did not let him know that. What she did
let him know was that she was falling in love with him deeply,
madly. In a field of sunflowers, she told him so for the first
time. Hazelville was a depressing town whose coal industry was long
dead and whose character had remained frozen for decades broad
avenues with broad storefronts with long-forgotten names: Franklins
Five and Dime. A town hidden in the recesses and folds of this big
land like a mole can hide in flabby flesh. She too had grown up in
Pennsylvania, on an apple farm commune in Snyder County, four hours
to the east, where hills rolled into
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