ŷ������

** spoiler alert ** I wondered why I kept reading this past the halfway mark because it was trite and boring. A self-deprecating fifty year old ex-actress living in Rome knows and understands there are “marchettas,�� basically men leeching off wealthy women, after her millions. She indulges one of them, Paolo, for much too long before revealing that she knows his plan to take her money (coordinated by an older Contessa). And then the book basically ends. The final page implies that she throws the keys to a flasher who has been stalking her for the entirety of the book to continue in her fight against “nothingness�� and “drifting�� without a purpose (which is deeply tied to her vanity and loss of good looks).

The plot and protagonist of this book seem far removed from our current milieu of celebrities in their 50s-70s who are still looking healthy, attractive, and are basking in the glow of their wealth. How could a 50 year-old actress be nearly suicidal in Rome with millions left from a husband she did not love but only tolerated in life? But, hey, who am I to say it could not be the case? It is all a recipe for a shallow and irritating protagonist.

The only piece of literary charm in this book lies in the metaphorical quality of her name, Mrs. Stone. Williams writes about her failing to portray a young Juliet in a Shakespearean production, “failure was being carved like a monument of stone��(108). The connection between this line and her name speaks volumes about her character: Mrs. Stone and the stone of failure implies that she is failure incarnate. Indeed, she is, and so is this book.