Searching Artistic Origins

After fourteen books in a multifarious literary career that spans nearly half a century, one would not expect Steve Katz to pin himself down to any one perspective. As W. C. Bamberger writes in 43 Views of Steve Katz (2007), "[f]rom The Exagggerations [of Peter Prince] through Moving Parts to Weir & Pouce, Swanny's Ways and Antonello's Lion, Katz has steadily been moving from the knows-too-much of post-modern consciousness toward a state of perpetual wonder at what he sees and feels and can imagine." The cartographer Ellis Prefontaine, a minor character in Antonello's Lion, echoes this sense of free-ranging wonder in the text: "I have made maps all my life, and now it is my pleasure to be lost." In his first novel since 1995's Swanny's Ways, it is Katz's pleasure to follow the lost into various degrees of foundness.

Antonello's Lion is a double picaresque centered on New York expatriate Solomon Briggs and his financial adviser son Nathan, who have never met. After impregnating his artist girlfriend in 1964, Solomon disappears in the boot of southern Italy while in search of a painting of Saint Francis by the Sicilian master Antonello de Messina (c. 1430-1479)—a work which, he believes, with an almost frightening tenacity, has been lost and awaits his re-discovery. His travels in search of this painting are intercut with Nathan's search for his father in 2001, a journey that becomes Solomon's paternal gift to his son.

The novel combines two of Katz's long-time loves—art and Italy—both of which he renders with a lush connoisseur's eye. He came of age in New York in the 1950s, just as that city rose to prominence on the international art scene, and Solomon's fervor for Antonello captures the appetites of that era. Katz also spent several years in the city of Lecce, around which the novel primarily unfolds, and gives full body to that region's landscape and people. We sometimes visit the same places in 1964 and 2001, and although the surface is different—roving bands of art students replace memories of American soldiers from WWII—the lure of the place for father and son remains.

Though it would be unfair to categorize Antonello's Lion as mere pas de deux, much of the narrative derives from the juxtaposition and overlapping of the two men's quests. Both are tunnel-visioned in pursuit of the self; they share a makeup that is part genetic, part a similar brand of Weltschmerz, part a shared need for a worldly home. Their fates and quests are intermingled to the degree that they become, at times, indistinguishable; Katz indeed starts many chapters without immediately letting us know which man we are following. Some of Katz's most colorful and decisive writing comes when he forces his characters to wait—Solomon for the woman who will show him a stored Antonello painting, Nathan for this mother, etc. These moments of repose let them see the world in ways that their compulsivity and perpetual busyness never allows.

But the two men's shared personality only sets up the more fertile differences between them. Minor characters Solomon meets—such as Annelino, the revolutionary on a ferry to Palermo, and Siegfried, the German egglayer—open themselves up to him and reveal their inner lives in startlingly moving fashion. He seeks, in Antonello's work, "the way to a secular spirituality" that he has a difficult time explaining to the old-world Catholics of southern Italy; he remains, to the end of his story, a man passionately connected to the world and to the people around him.

But Nathan generates no such trust, and remains a cipher even to himself. A financial adviser who has made at least one friend fantastically wealthy, he disdains money. He seems willfully blind about his own life, wandering in circles while he waits his turn in the novel's parallel structure, and his adventures pale in...