L'America

A soft clash of civilizations disrupts romance in this rapturous but socially acute fable of cross-class love. Sojourning in Europe, 18-year-old Beth, raised by her hippie father on a Pennsylvania commune, finds her polar opposite in Cesare, handsome scion of a 500-year-old Italian banking dynasty. For the motherless Beth, Cesare represents the allure of rootedness and gracious traditions. For Cesare, straitjacketed by family, class expectations and a prospective banking career he dreads, Beth represents America's wide-open possibilities, headquartered at her father's egalitarian but entrepreneurial commune, a refuge for dreamers of all stripes seeking to reinvent themselves. Besotted as they are with each other, Beth and Cesare find themselves drawn apart—Cesare back to the comforting confines of his hometown, Beth to New York, where her idea of home is a succession of illegal sublets and where she commercializes her love of Italy by writing cookbooks and starting restaurants. McPhee's lush, erotically charged prose evokes their erotic obsession—and the glamorous Old World locales where it blossoms—but, as in her well-received family sagas Bright Angel Time and Gorgeous Lies , McPhee's real subject is the larger forces that shape individual lives and passions. (Apr.)