The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Five Doubts by Mary CaponegroRobert L. McLaughlin
Mary Caponegro. Five Doubts. Marsilio, 1998. 139 pp. $19.95.
Five Doubts, Mary Caponegro’s latest book, contains five complex and powerful pieces, unconnected narratively, but interdependent in subject, technique, and theme. Each piece is inspired by a different work of Italian visual art from a variety of time periods, Etruscan to the present, and each inspiring doubts—many more than five—about art, culture, truth, life, and death. “Il Libro dell’Arte” takes us inside a Verrochio painting where the seeming abundance of vegetable and animal life serves only an artist’s programmatic attempts to make his art a mirror of the world while his real opportunities for living are ignored and lost. “The Spectacle,” based on a mosaic depicting a Roman entertainment, shifts focalization from individual members of the crowd to the animals on display, breaking down the boundaries between spectators and spectacle. “Tombola” uses the form and illustrations of a game board to collapse the past and future of one man’s life and introduces translated passages from popular Italian magazines to collapse the distinction between the individual and the surrounding culture. “An Etruscan Catechism” takes illustrations from a tomb painting and the catechism form to explore truth and doubt and the deaths of individuals and cultures. Finally, “Doubt Uncertainty Possibility Desire” (a title suggested by the Italian subjunctive mood) juxtaposes passages from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, passages from contemporary works on virtual reality, medical technology, cancer, and AIDS, and fictional narration by Salai, one of da Vinci’s apprentices, to bring together ideas on love, the body, and illness, and, most important, to suggest connections between life and art far more significant and vital than those lampooned in the first story. Caponegro’s writing is intelligent, exciting, moving, and always surprising; it combines a keen awareness of the postmodern challenges to narrative fiction with a profound sense of art’s ability to speak to human conditions. [Robert L. McLaughlin]