In time I learned that the woman put my contacts to immediate use and arranged a wonderful free holiday for herself at the villa in Anguilla I'd recommended. Of course she never answered my e-mails, and I never heard from her again. The Henry James-like incident, though a trifle, left its mark on me.
In James's "international" novels, Americans abroad, full of Yankee optimism, ingenuousness, and vitality (and usually money, too), become twisted into knots trying to decipher the manners and motives of Europe and Europeans. As long as Americans travel to Europe, James will always be relevant, and as long as James is relevant, so too will novels like Joseph Olshan's "The Conversion," preoccupied as it is with the subtleties and mysteries of the Continent, and the dogged efforts of Americans to translate - or as Olshan would have it, to convert - not only their language and behavior, but the essence of feeling, into a culture at once so accessible and so unyieldingly foreign.
"The Conversion" is also about the collision of American and Italian writers. The narrator, a Brooklynite named Russell Todaro and the author of an obscure novella, still pines for the married Parisian who refused to leave his wealthy wife. While Russell is traveling through Europe with his lover, Ed, an older, very successful American poet who is struggling to finish his memoirs, Ed has a sort of premonition. In a Paris cafe he approaches the elegant Italian novelist Marina Vezzoli, whom he once met briefly, but (to his mind) memorably. But the woman feigns not to remember him, lightly insulting his Italian for good measure. That evening, after a bungled burglary attempt in their hotel room, Ed suffers a fatal heart attack. Soon, inquiries about Ed's missing, uncompleted manuscript come across the Atlantic, and the blunt yet enigmatic Marina reappears, as if one cue, to offer Russell a respite at her storied Tuscan villa. Her true agenda is at first difficult to discern.
