Book Review

City of Falling Angels
by John Berendt
The Penguin Press, 2005
http://us.penguingroup.com.
ISBN: 1594200580

John Berendt is the luckiest writer on earth. Wherever the guy goes, stories just wait for him like big juicy steaks on a platter. During successive, "super-saver" trips to Savannah, Georgia, in the 1980s, he began to follow, over the course of ten years, a murder trial entrapping the city's wealthy socialites and poorer citizens alike. The trial, in which antiques dealer Jim Williams was accused of murdering his young gigolo boyfriend, Danny Hansford (Williams claimed self-defense), formed the basis for Berendt's bestselling debut, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Midnight, of course, was about more than a murder trial. It was a quirky tapestry of transsexuals and voodoo witches and debutante balls that put Savannah—and Midnight—on the map for much of the 1990s.

What does one do for a follow-up? Well, if you're Berendt, you fly to Venice in 1996 during the off-season. You arrive three days after a suspicious fire has destroyed the historic Fenice Opera House. Arson is suspected, and subjects range anywhere from the blue-collar electricians pulling off a job for the mafia to inept-but-powerful government officials. The guy's got an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time—you gotta wonder why he doesn't just buy himself a Mystery Machine and a dog named Scooby Doo.

Anyway, Berendt spent seven years chronicling the events that unfolded during his arrival, and his second book, The City of Falling Angels, shares Midnight's successful template. Like Midnight, Berendt is able to recount the fiery images and aftermath of the burning Fenice alongside tales of some of the city's own fiery citizens. There is the gay poet Mario Stefani, a semi-local celebrity and good-hearted neighbor whose mysterious suicide shocks the Campo San Giacomo dell'Orio community in which he lives. (Although, inexplicitly, Berendt saves his story until nearly the end of the book.) There is the glassworker Archimede Seguso, who witnesses the fire from his rooftop and recounts his own version through more than a hundred blown-glass works, all of which become the heart of a legal battle between his sons. There is Ezra Pound's widowed mistress, Olga Rudge, who is nearly taken to the cleaners after befriending the Rylands, conniving ex-Brits who also have immersed themselves in the late art heiress (and Venetian by residence) Peggy Guggenheim's affairs. Finally, of course, there are Enrico Carella and Massimiliano Marchetti, the two electricians at the heart of the arson trial of the Fenice.

However, what Angels shares in basic formula with Midnight, it misses in its cohesiveness. Berendt made Savannah feel like a small, incestuous town, where the upper crust and bread crumbs, for all their differences, always seemed to find themselves entangled in the same stuffing. Angels, on the other hand, although competently written and immersed with conversational detail, is all silver spoons and no Styrofoam plates. Berendt stays at the home of Peter and Rose Lauritzen, connected Americans in Venice, and connected he similarly becomes. When he's not attending balls, he's gazing at the ceilings at the Palazzo Barbaro, a private palace that hosted Robert Browning and Henry James over the years. He's also stenciling the disputes among the members of the American high-end charity, Save Venice, whose internal squabbles take up far too much space in the book, even if they're paying for it—after all, they contributed $300,000 to the restoration of the Fenice's ceiling. A lot of Angels feels like an upscale episode of Entertainment Tonight and reads similarly like such gossip.

Although Berendt tries to work in characters such from the other side of the canals, so to speak, such as Mario Moro, crazy man of Venice, the anecdotes don't resonate or build upon themselves. In fact, we never see Moro again. Similarly, although Berendt recounts in great detail the ceilings at the Palazzo Barbaro, one never gets a sense of the earth at his feet—the sites, the smells of everyday Venice, walking from one end to the other. It's as if Berendt has anointed himself the literary Robin Leach. Which is fine—if you like reading about the lifestyles of the rich and somewhat famous. However, if you want to feel the entire pulse of the city, give Midnight another read. It contains a rule of thumb Berendt seems to have forgotten after his surprise literary fame—it takes different strokes to move the world. And one's readers.