Naughty but nice

The first story in this very fine collection takes the most risks, not unlike its protagonist. Ariel, a sophisticated, self-aware, American wife pays for two high-class prostitutes to entertain her wealthy Italian husband: ‘It’s a birthday present,’ she explains over the phone, trying hard to picture the girl on the other end of the line as she speaks. The idea is the suggestion of her husband’s provocative friend, Flavio, for whom Ariel has come to feel affection. Five or six years ago, Flavio ‘gave up trying to seduce Ariel, and settled for the alternative intimacy of tormenting her subtly whenever they meet’.

But to this particularly intimate taunt Ariel has a surprising response: she agrees to the idea, and the birthday present is crisply, efficiently arranged. As are the resulting emotions, ostensibly, at any rate:

When a marriage lingers at a certain stage – the not uncommon plateau where the two people involved have nothing to say to each other – it is sometimes still possible for them to live well together. To perform generous acts that do not, exactly, signal desperation.

This is good writing. So who is Andrea Lee? A Harvard graduate and a former staffer for the New Yorker, she lives in Turin with her husband and two children. Many of her stories are set in affluent northern Italian cities, giving them a richly distinctive atmosphere. It is a world of attractive but arrogant businessmen and glamorous, hunted women in their twenties, of colonnaded town centres and industrial fringes, of ‘fog and cappuccinos’. A few of Lee’s other stories draw on her middle-class, Afro-American upbringing, deftly touching on race politics and the ambiguities of identity.

She has written one novel, Sarah Phillips, and now this collection of stories, almost all of which display the kind of acute savviness about men and women one associates with Alice Munro, perhaps the greatest of the New Yorker’s present stable of short- story writers.