Palladio - Softcover

An unforgettable portrait of a man haunted by memories of the woman who got away_blended skillfully with a searing look at the role of art and memory in our times.

In a small, foundering town in central New York, Molly Howe grows up to be a seemingly ordinary but deeply charismatic young woman. As a teenager, she has an affair with a much older man--a relationship that thrills her at first, until the two of them are discovered, and she learns how difficult it can be to get away with such a transgression in a small town. Cast out by her parents, she moves in with her emotionally enigmatic brother, Richard, in Berkeley, California. At her lowest moment, she falls in with a young art student named John Wheelwright. Each of them believes--though for very different reasons--that this is the love that can save them. Then Molly, after being called home for a family emergency, disappears.
A decade later, John has gone on to a promising career at a "cutting edge" advertising agency in New York. He seems on a familiar road to success--until he wanders into the path of Malcolm Osbourne, an eccentric advertising visionary who decries modern advertising's reliance on smirking irony and calls for a popular art of true belief and sincerity. Toward this end, Mal founds--and invites John to join--a unique artists' colony-cum-ad agency called Palladio, in Charlottesville, Virginia. The risky, much-ridiculed venture brings them undreamt-of fame and influence. It also brings, literally to their door, Molly Howe.
In a triumph of literary ingenuity, Jonathan Dee weaves together the stories of this unforgettable pair, raising haunting questions about the sources of art, the pain of lost love, and whether it pays to have a conscience in our cynical age.

“A vastly impressive book. . . . Dee has given us a full rich cultural chronicle.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Pure literary entertainment . . . Palladio has narrative drive and energy, dramatic characters and conflicts, easygoing prose . . . humor and drama.” –The Denver Post

“Dee unites a gripping love story with an ambitious novel of ideas.” –Newsday

“In gorgeous language, hypnotic as a fairy tale . . . Palladio takes the moral temperature of our times.” –Newark Star-Ledger

“Palladio shocks, delights and invigorates.” –The Seattle Times

“Dee is always able to locate the abstract in the concrete. . . . A Tribeca studio or a small town abortion clinic or a Christian cultist sermon, are all equally interesting to him, and his clear, understated prose gives them a precise fictional life.” –The Boston Phoenix

“Robustly imagined.” –Time Out New York

“Dee perceptively explores the reciprocity of private manias and decadent social trends . . . dramatizing piquant questions of authenticity and mendacity, purity and depravity, leadership and despotism, love and manipulation.” –Booklist