A Constant Lover

F. Scott Hoch, ``just a low-class Brooklyn bawdy boy,'' is footloose in Florence, having ditched his earnest feminist historian wife, two teenage kids and his career as head of a window- and toilet-cleaning firm. So named because he was born on the birthday of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the cynical narrator of this droll, exhilarating novel forgoes his dalliances with a bevy of foreign women after he acts as courier between old street artist Michelangelo de Grappa and the man's long-lost daughter and grandson. Freighted with enough symbolic baggage to sink it, this exceptional story soars nevertheless, buoyed by exuberant Joycean wordplay, imbued with a Renaissance spirit of improvisation and unbridled eros, and drenched in the atmosphere of Florence, where the shades of Dante and Galileo flit over his rented Hertz car. Rosenblatt ( The Sun in Capricorn ) overdoes the self-analytical stream-of-consciousness, but readers seduced by his novel's abundant gifts will want to devour this ribald capriccio in one sitting. (Nov.)