Partita in Venice

An ambitious novel that attempts to pay homage to the body of literature immortalizing Venice, Leviant's fourth book (after The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah) is sabotaged by its own insufferable protagonist. Middle-aged Thomas Manning has come to Venice for a reunion with a woman he courted passionately in the same city exactly 25 years earlier. Manning and Zoe parted acrimoniously, but agreed to meet at the fountain on the Piazza San Marco a quarter-century later, whatever their circumstances. Yet just before the rendezvous, Manning meets Happy, a pretty, scatterbrained, aggressively carnal young blonde who inexplicably reminds him of the more innocent Zoe, and he is torn between his new love and his old one. Manning is condescending toward both women, insisting that neither one is smart enough to understand his lightning wit, his subtle word play or the expansive vocabulary he uses to deliver bombastic monologues on the mysteries of Venice. Indeed, Manning is so arrogant and self-satisfied that the reader can only imagine he is meant to be a figure of fun. Yet Manning's point of view is never challenged, and the fun fails to materialize. Like his hero, the author does not wear his erudition lightly, and he injects heavy-handed literary references (""Now he knew what the prisoner felt in the puncturing machine in Kafka's `The Penal Colony'""), aggravated by uneven prose, which contains as many strained metaphors as original, well-turned phrases. The narrative does pick up momentum toward the end, as the appointed hour of the meeting nears and a horrifying truth is revealed in the very last line, but by then many havve lost patience with Manning--and his creator. (Nov.) FYI: Leviant's The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award.