Malefactress
By Pico Iyer
ANY FOUR WOMEN COULD ROB THE BANK OF ITALY
by Ann Cornelisen; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 291 pages; $15.95
"Men might be cerebral," muses one female crook, "but not about women." With a dash of irony and a hint of irreverence, Ann Cornelisen puts that theory to the test in her puckish new novel. Determined to tease men out of their cozy gallantry, and also to expose Italy's rococo inefficiency, a sextet of foreign women in a sleepy Tuscan village decide to rob a local mail train. Plotting the crime as if it were a script, they adopt literary aliases, don disguises and then, without much difficulty, carry off the million-dollar theft. The lackadaisical local police force instantly sets up an intensive manhunt, combing the area for conmen, wise guys and rogues. But the women, as they had suspected, are not in the least suspected.
From her mischievous and misleading title to her topsy-turvy feminism -- "I say women are as innately evil and grasping or selfish as men and fully as criminal. They have a right to equal suspicion," says one malefactress -- Cornelisen shares both the conspirators' secrets and their seditious high spirits. But she refuses to let them get away clean. After the caper, the culprits are unsettled not by their guilt or greed but, more fittingly, by their insouciance and sprightly intelligence. And in the end they begin to suspect that inefficiency may, after all, be Italy's greatest charm, and chivalry men's saving grace.
An American who has lived in Italy for 30 years, Cornelisen is so much at home with the Italian scene and its cosmopolitan settlers that she can at once see through them and like what she perceives. Her four earlier books were heartfelt documentaries about depressed villages and their degraded women; here she addresses the flip side of the country's trials. Her most winning character is, in a sense, the lazy, sunlit hill town of San Felice Val Gufo, whose main industry is gossip and main activity leisure. Its happy-go-lucky air is eminently well suited to the semi-elegant foreign riffraff--lascivious artists, terminal good-for-nothings, dotty Brits, retired CIA agents and indiscriminate snobs--who haunt the area. So blundering and blustering are the idle expatriates that the locals are moved to conclude that "foreigners were almost like real people."
In the face of all these riotous acts and raucous collisions, Cornelisen raises her eyebrows more often than her voice. She propels the reader through an elaborate wild-gander chase with confident speed but with deftness enough to deal with its various flat tires and accidents. By the end, indeed, she has succeeded in driving her point home without losing her balance. --By Pico Iyer
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