Frances Mayes’s new novel, Women in Sunlight, is about three women “of a certain age” who first meet when their well-intentioned families try to usher them into a retirement home. None is ready to be stashed away and they figure out an escape: They will run off together and rent a villa in Tuscany.
Mayes’s love affair with Tuscany is well established, beginning with her bestselling 1996 memoir Under the Tuscan Sun—adapted as a 2003 movie starring Diane Lane—and continuing in such books as Bella Tuscany and Every Day in Tuscany. Mayes can make the landscape of Tuscany glow, and she does so in Women in Sunlight, offering the stories of three American women on a quest to create lives beyond 24/7 attention to husbands and children.
Mayes oddly casts as the narrator a younger American named Kit Raines, a writer who lives across the street from the villa where the three women will live for a year. Raines’s writing is not going well and she finds sunlight only when she becomes a wife and has a baby. Her narratorly voice is distracting, and readers may be inclined to speed past her presence to the real substance of the story—the three women enthusiastically bent on reinventing themselves.
One of the three women, Susan, was a successful realtor. Now widowed, she immerses herself in the wonders of Tuscan gardens, and designs the grounds of their villa. Landscaping becomes her new vocation.
Julia is escaping a cheating husband. Her career was as an editor of beautiful books about food and culture, and in Tuscany she revels in the arrays of perfect prosciuttos, olives, cheeses, and wines. She learns how to cook Tuscan foods, and voyeuristic readers are treated to descriptions of semolina gnocchi with parmesan and duck breasts with balsamic reduction and orange peel. Julia’s epiphany comes when she decides to write a book on cooking in Tuscany; she’s calling it Learning Italian. (Mayes herself came out with The Tuscan Sun Cookbook in 2012, cowritten with her husband.)
Camille is the most interesting of the trio. A recent widow, she decides to reclaim an artistic calling she sacrificed for marriage and children. In a book of sunlight, it is only in the dark of night that Camille reconnects with her artistic talent, in an exhilarating burst of creative activity that starts with a painting of a door.
What a pleasure to meet these three women—and to enjoy again Mayes’s ability to conjure the sumptuous sunlight of Tuscany.
