The Italian Actress

At the heart of Frank Lentricchia's funny and tragic new novel, "The Italian Actress," is his admiring gaze at a 30-year-old photo of the beautiful Claudia Cardinale while visiting a small alabaster shop in Volterra, Italy.

"She was maybe 35 or 40 in the photo," Lentricchia said of the star of Fellini's "8 1/2" and "The Pink Panther." "The photo of her was inscribed to the shop owner, and I went to him and said in my fractured Italian, ‘She doesn't look like that anymore.' He smiled and in his perfect Italian said, ‘Who does?'"

When Lentricchia, the Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature at Duke, walked out of the alabaster shop, he remained haunted by the image of Claudia's youthful beauty. And in the image, he found the idea for his seventh published work of fiction.

The story centers on Jack Del Piero, an aging avant-garde filmmaker coming to terms with aging, death and the desire to achieve fame and secular immortality. The novel's title refers to a fictional version of Claudia Cardinale herself. Now aging but still beautiful, Claudia meets Del Piero in Volterra, and the two develop an unusual romance.

Del Piero is an artist in a rut. He hasn't produced any new work in two decades, during which he's taught at an American university. Once famous for his avant-garde films, he finds a new life with Claudia, but it's based on his infatuation with the youthful Claudia Cardinale of "8 ½," when she was 22 years old. When a strange couple offers him a chance to regain his youthful notoriety with a gruesome collaboration, one that is graphically depicted in the novel, he leaps at the opportunity.

Lentricchia readily admitted he shares some of his hero's obsessions. Prompted by his gaze at Cardinale's photo, Lentricchia has crafted a story about society's worship of youth, beauty, celebrity and the denial of death.

"Some of this is me trying to come to terms with mortality and the cult of beauty," he said in an interview.

"When I saw [Claudia's photograph], I was stunned by it. I wanted my lead character to be obsessed with her youth and beauty. His problem is he cannot accept change, either in her or ultimately in himself."

Lentricchia said he is hard on his hero in part because of his conflicted identification with him. But Jack Del Piero's obsession with the youthful image of Claudia prevents him from seeing the beauty of the older, real woman before him, and that provides an opportunity for harsh satire.

"Claudia is still good-looking," Lentricchia said. "In the novel, she's the center of humanity and morality. She accepts her physical change. He doesn't, and she finally rubs his nose in it.

"Life is a process of physical change which is relentless and leads to one place and one place only. Jack's denial of that is a pathetic and sad attempt to overcome that fear and denial by worship of youth. What drew me to this story is our culture's worship of youth and celebrity."

But within the strange relationships and even hideous acts in the novel, Lentricchia said the story contains a mature respect for the value of beauty. He wraps in subtle puns and references to Shakespeare's sonnets and Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The cult of youth may diminish Jack Del Piero's imagination, but it doesn't diminish the quality of Claudia Cardinale in "8 ½."

"Pleasure in beauty is not necessarily tinged with melancholy," Lentricchia said. "What is sad is that one might in the elevation of such pleasure in beauty make it difficult to appreciate and love the older person."

The drama and comedy of life on the extremes of society isn't new territory for Lentricchia, whose recent fiction also includes "Lucchesi and the Whale" and "The Book of Ruth."

"I don't write about middle class everyday life, which is the traditional province of the novel," he said. "My writing has always been about the extreme range. In those extremes I get at the material I want to get out. That couple he meets are vehicles of my own satiric impulse to send up this desire for celebrity. In today's society, there's not a clear answer to how far are you willing to go to be famous."

Frank Lentricchia reads from "The Italian Actress"

Following the book's publication this semester, Lentricchia had an opportunity to discuss it with students in a modern literature class taught by Duke professor Victor Strandberg.

Lentricchia said the young students' response heartened him. This wasn't a story he would be able to write at their age, but he said talking with them about a book concerned with youth and beauty helped him think about his own work in a different way.

"I was thrilled and stunned by their insights," he said. "The creative process is fueled by all kinds of things, but it doesn't always involve reflection. I'm not sure the author has the inside track on his own work. So it was quite an experience to see how the students reacted to the novel, and it helped me understand how they view these same questions."

The novel, published by the State University of New York Press, made the rounds first as the basis of a play written and directed by Jody McAuliffe and performed last fall by Little Green Pig Theater.