WHAT SHE DID FOR LOVE

THE SIXTEEN PLEASURES

By Robert Hellenga

Soho. 327 pp. $22

THE SIXTEEN PLEASURES is a first novel with a finger in three or four familiar literary pies. It is typical of what some might call the James Michener school of fiction, where the author's detailed knowledge of some esoteric subject is at least as important as the characters and the plot -- in this case, the restoration and conservation of art-works spoiled in the disastrous 1966 flood in Florence, Italy. It's also a love story, and the story of a young woman blossoming into adulthood, and a suspense novel featuring the sale of an erotic manuscript.

Margot Harrington, a 29-year-old American book conservator, comes to Florence to volunteer her skills as part of a heroic effort to save the city's flood-damaged works of art. She falls in love with Alessandro Postiglione, "Sandro," a charming Italian in his fifties, separated from his wife, and "the head restorer of works of fine art in the province of Tuscany." It's Sandro who gets her a job working on a book-restoration project in a convent library where she comes across a valuable 16th-century erotic manuscript. As Margot gets to know and like the nuns, she decides to sell the manuscript secretly. She wants to give the convent financial independence from the bishop, who has been threatening to bequeath the entire convent library to some monks.

Yet The Sixteen Pleasures also goes beyond recognizable genres with a narrative that takes time out to meditate on life. The "sixteen pleasures" of the title, erotic postures in the old manuscript, are a starting point for musings on many other human pleasures, such as art, religion, work, love of various kinds, home and family -- as well as some opposites, like greed, selfishness, and wanton destruction. Like many first novels, this one has a questing feel. Margot, still uncertain about how to handle life, has various adventures that ultimately give her a measure of insight -- nothing startling, just a quiet appreciation of life's unexpectedness, of the potential for joy in the present moment, and a sense that she can shape her own life.

Some pieces of the novel's ambitious patchwork work well. Hellenga is a man who pays attention to detail. A teacher of English at Knox College in Illinois and a scholar of the humanities, he also spent a year in Florence. Descriptions stemming from Hellenga's professional knowledge are the high points of this book. Readers will surely cheer Sandro, and then Margot, when he comes to the rescue of some sodden frescoes almost destroyed by a colleague's attempt to dry them out with immense heaters, and when she spends hours over the meticulous restoration of the flood-damaged book containing "the sixteen pleasures." It's not the usual stuff of suspense novels, to be sure. But Hellenga makes the fate of artworks matter.

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Equally suspenseful are Margot's maneuvers to sell the restored book, a real 16th-century manuscript containing a series of sexually explicit drawings by Giulio Romano, Raphael's best pupil, engraved by the renowned Marcantonio Raimondi and accompanied by 16 graphic sonnets, "sonetti lussuriosi," by the poet and satirist Pietro Aretino. The scene of its sale at a Sotheby's auction is brow-moppingly tense.

NOT EVERYTHING about The Sixteen Pleasures works. Though enjoyably wide-ranging in the tradition of the 19th-century novel, it's not wide-ranging enough. There is too much ground to cover in too small a space for the book to say anything very original, and the characters' musings, though intelligent, don't go very deep. The love story, too, fails to excite. Margot and Sandro are down-to-earth pragmatists, sweet but not really that interesting. Indeed, Margot could be speaking for both of them when she says, "I don't think Sandro had a metaphysical bone in his body -- he was a man who loved things rather than ideas, surfaces rather than essences . . ." This is largely a book for the head, not the heart. There's something cool about it.

Yet there are many fine moments. Hellenga is an inspired writer of satiric comedy. One hilarious chapter describes Sandro's torment at the "Sacra Rota," a papal court overseeing appeals in the lengthy, ludicrously complicated Italian divorce proceedings. Three judges explore in minute detail and loaded technical language the issue of Sandro's fictitious impotence on his wedding night 20 years before.

Hellenga also hints at a talent for mining darker moods. The court hearing renders Sandro temporarily impotent with Margot, a jarring experience, forcing him to confront the very real gap between them. Too many things are in the way: his age, their different cultures, his half-hearted attempt to cheat her of the money for the manuscript, even his dislike of Chinese food. The usually light-hearted Sandro discovers a sense of his mortality.

In moments like these, Hellenga's art and his feeling for the characters combine briefly to produce something quite moving. He gives us the sense that his next novel might explore human emotion more deeply than The Sixteen Pleasures, which is nevertheless a fascinating and frequently funny book.

Charlotte Innes writes about books for the Lambda Book Report, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, the New York Times Book Review and many other publications.

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