No Magnolias in Florence

THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA (110 pp.)--Ellzabefh Spencer--McGraw-Hill ($3).

The fictional American in Europe is apt to be a boor, a nincompoop, or else a sudden convert to the notion that his home soil is spiritually sterile. Even Henry James, the foremost author in the field, wrote less from an observer's strength than from a vantage point uneasily anchored in an inferiority complex. Talented Novelist Elizabeth Spencer (The Voice at the Back Door) does not entirely escape the compulsion to prove that as a sensitive U.S. writer, she understands the gaucherie of her countrymen. But The Light in the Piazza is one of the best novels in a long time about Americans abroad.

Flashing Sweetness. In less than one-third the space required by most novelists to elaborate a banality, Author Spencer tells a suspenseful story, knowledgeably confronts and synthesizes two foreign viewpoints, and gives dignity to a love story that could very easily have become a tearjerker. Margaret Johnson is a Southern woman at the age when most facts of life have become more plain than attractive. Her husband is comfortably well off, her figure is still good, and she is on vacation in Italy with Clara, her 26-year-old daughter. Because of a childhood head injury, Clara has the mentality of a child of ten. The love between mother and daughter is surely suggested, not spelled out, in moments of flashing sweetness. What bothers Mrs. Johnson is that her simple-minded but beautiful child has fallen in love with a young Florentine who runs a shop and whose family would certainly seem like comic-opera Italians to her all-American husband.

Fabrizio obviously does not know that Clara is mentally deficient, but there is no doubting his or his family's seriousness. Mrs. Johnson's dilemma is simple but terrible. Shall she explain and take her daughter away from disturbing Florence, or shall she give her daughter the chance at a normal woman's life that she will never get back home? In one moving moment she realizes that Clara, "whether she could do long division or not, was a woman."

Unblinkered Humaneness. Slyly, gently, a wily old civilization sets a question afloat: Is Clara a virgin? Money is vaguely but obviously to be considered: What dowry? To Clara's mother, all this is evidence of deep, cultural differences: "It's simply that they are facing what I am hiding from." And Fabrizio's father, devoted though he is to his fat, pious wife, is unmistakably attracted to Mrs. Johnson. Italian practicality, ruthlessness, an odd breed of unblinkered humaneness, scrapes blatantly against U.S. generosity and naivete.

In an ending that is both delicately contrived and impeccably honest, Author Spencer triumphantly fuses all conflicts. Her American mother and daughter have dignity and grace, and if the absent Mr. Johnson runs to formula, he is at least understandable. For once, Europeans and Americans face each other in credible postures, described in writing that has a creditable stance of its own.

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