Using art history and great fiction writing as a backdrop, Goodman's The Night Villa serves as a real page turner.
The Plot
Publisher's Weekly described the plot in Goodman's second novel best in their September issue, "in this complex and lyrical literary thriller from Goodman (The Sonnet Lover), University of Texas classics professor Sophie Chase, after barely surviving a gunman with ties to a sinister cult, joins an expedition to Capri. A donor has funded both the exact reconstruction of a Roman villa destroyed when Mount Vesuvius buried nearby Herculaneum in A.D. 79, and a computer system that can decipher the charred scrolls being excavated from the villa's ruins.
Personal Endeavors
Sophie's hopes for a recuperative idyll fade after her old boyfriend, who disappeared years before into the same cult as the campus gunman, appears in the area, implicating the cult in a criminal conspiracy. Meanwhile, extracts from the scrolls—the journals of a Roman visiting the villa just before the volcano erupted—shade toward bloodshed and betrayal. The scrolls' oddly modern tone aside, Goodman deftly mixes cultural and religious history, geography, myth, personal memory, dream and even portent without sacrificing narrative drive, against the beautiful backdrop of the locale with its echoes of unimaginable loss."
Strengths
With such a lush plot, Goodman balances the magic of such a time in art history with creating real characters that make the reader truly feel for them as they undergo each shift and new challenge that Goodman throws at them along the way. Dan Brown's DaVinci Code and Angels & Demons have nothing on what Goodman created in this rather quick read.
Weaknesses
The downfall to Goodman's book are the historical inaccuracies that she makes every now and again, especially in terms of Pompeii and its archeology. Better fact checking and referencing could have avoided it, however, as with a lot of historical fiction written by non-scholars, mistakes such as these can be expected. It does not take away from the overall quality of creativity in the book, but it does become frustrating for readers who are in the field of art history, especially those who have specialized in the area. Outside of the reader's background, however, these mistakes do not take away from the story as this is a fiction book where the author has the ability to create a story as opposed to strictly adhering to a textbook explanation of what truly occurred.
Overall, Goodman's The Night Villa is a great read especially if a reader is looking for something to fill in these last few days of summer.
Carol Goodman's The Night Villa is available for purchase through Ballantine Books with ISBN 0345479602.
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