The Uncle from Rome, by Joseph Caldwell

How often do you read the final chapter of a novel with ever gathering dread, not knowing what catastrophe will befall characters you have genuinely begun to care about – only to read the final brief paragraph in fits of laughter?

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

Joseph Caldwell produced this charming tale from a year spent in Italy on the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He had learned that Neapolitan bourgeois, hoping to impress guests at weddings (or funerals or baptisms), would sometimes hire a dignified gentleman to be introduced as “the uncle from Rome,” so that all their acquaintances would believe they had important connections in the capital.

Caldwell’s protagonist is Michael Ruane, an American tenor, a comprimario singing Spoletta in a series of performances at the Teatro San Carlo. He is anxious to ingratiate himself with more famous figures, such as the reigning Tosca of the hour, Agenice Calefati. The diva requests a favor: that he appear as “the uncle from Rome” at the wedding of one of her relations. Michael, who has the proper distinguished appearance (if a little young for it), agrees, only to be caught up in a circuitous buffo plot, entreated for aid and interference by the bride, the groom, and the groom’s brother (who is also involved with the bride), all of whom believe he is a little-known Roman kinsman. It doesn’t help that Michael is falling for the lovely bridegroom himself.

That is the intrigue, but there are other stories here: the AIDS epidemic is beginning to spread, Michael’s lover having died of it back in the States, and he becomes involved willy-nilly with a young Neapolitan who may or may not have the disease.

Too, on the operatic side of matters, Michael aspires to stage the Italian premiere of Britten’s Curlew River, his own translation and production, in which, as matters slither to a head, he ends up playing the cross-dressed role of the Madwoman. And within this nest of conflicting stories, Caldwell’s gentle wit (he had been a writer for Dark Shadows) and background knowledge of opera and of the great queer world of the mid-century, meet and contend, and the humanity of his beautifully drawn but somewhat perverse characters plays out against the spectacular backdrop of ruinous, magnificent Naples.

And there are laughs. And deaths. And sex. And opera. And Italian food.