Convoluted 'Wonder' revolves around a Fascist fantasy

The Eighth Wonder of the World

In the end, it's really all E. L. Doctorow's fault: his hugely influential 1975 novel "Ragtime" began the contemporary trend of historical novels that mix fact and fiction, real personages and imaginary characters, into a giant stew that mingles the novelist's urge to create with the historian's drive to document. Or perhaps we need to go back further, to "War and Peace," or even to Dante. Either way, some heads are going to have to roll, because Leslie Epstein's convoluted, Doctorow-esque novel of the Second World War, Italian Fascism, and the American architect who set out to build a true successor to the seven ancient wonders is a failure.

Epstein, the author of nine previous books, has visited similar wartime territory before, with the comic-tragic Holocaust novel "King of the Jews"; most recently, he returned to his Hollywood childhood (his father and uncle were Philip and Julius Epstein, writers of "Casablanca") for the touching, tender, semi-autobiographical "San Remo Drive." With "Eighth Wonder," Epstein puts his miniatures away, and returns again to the large canvases he favors. And large it is: "Eighth Wonder" incorporates historical figures like Pope Pius XII, Benito Mussolini, Guglielmo Marconi, and Roman chief rabbi Israel Zolli into its portrait of wartime Italy, and the precarious fate of its Jews. Even the fictional figures are composites of sorts, including famed architect Amos Prince, who combines Philip Johnson's enthusiasm for Fascism as an expression of architectural ideals with Ezra Pound's service as an English-language broadcaster of noxious anti-Semitic slurs and Zionist conspiracy-mongering, all delivered in faux down-home vernacular. An American on the run from the authorities , Amos has settled in Italy and won a Mussolini-sponsored competition to build a memorial honoring the triumphant Ethiopian campaign. Assisting him in his work is Maximilian Shabilian, an American Jew and student of architecture who hopes to learn from the master, and get close to Amos's nubile daughter Aria.

Amos's winning design is called "La Vittoria," and it is an expression of military triumph as Fascist phallicism: a mile-high skyscraper shooting out of the ancient Circus Maximus, a permanent shadow cast over the city of Rome, with Mussolini himself presiding from its peak. Max oversees the building effort, and when the Jews of Italy are faced with deportation to the death camps, he emerges with a brainstorm straight out of the Bible: employ the Jews as slave labor to build La Vittoria, serving Il Duce the way they once served the Pharaoh . "Eighth Wonder" presents us with Mussolini and his henchmen, Nazi builders and destroyers like Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels, and the tormented Jews of Rome; and yet, its version of the worst calamity of the 20th century, and the specter of Fascism's grinning death's head, is curiously airless and inconsequential. The Italians and Germans are Fascists straight out of Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark," cartoon baddies speaking mangled English. Epstein's version of Mussolini's right-hand man, Roberto Farinacci, is prone to making statements like "The Duce, he ride a hooorse: is mooost fast hooorse inna woold. . . . Una bicicletta? Is winner of Tooor of France. Fascismo: it is speed! Speed! Speed!," and Mussolini himself is more Chico Marx than Nietzschean Superman, his gibberish patter almost hilarious until we remember whose mouth it is intended to be emerging from. The whole of "Eighth Wonder" is like this, its progress impeded by plodding, leaden language (Epstein is particularly overmatched when it comes to action sequences) and poor pacing.

If you squint your eyes and look hard enough, you can almost make out the germ of the book Epstein meant to write, a bittersweet evocation and condemnation of Fascist fantasy, as seen through the eyes of a double outsider -- an American and a Jew. Shabilian is meant as our intercessor and interpreter, bringing us closer to the fundamentally mysterious Amos and the entirely incomprehensible Fascists, but Epstein muddies his own waters, unintentionally turning Amos, Mussolini, and the rest into simple-minded caricatures, and little else. We never entirely grasp what has attracted Amos to Fascism, or what keeps Max from turning against a man, and a regime, almost entirely dedicated to the destruction of his race.

The book's characters are all apportioned one trait each: Amos the punner, his son Franklin the true believer, his daughter Nina the lovestruck one, and so forth. "Eighth Wonder" is infuriating because it takes real-life figures, and these matters of literal life and death, and trivializes them, making them nothing more than cardboard cutouts before which our protagonists stand. But these people really were, we want to cry, and their actions determined the course of thousands, millions of lives. Mussolini was no mere buffoon -- he was a canny authoritarian and a vicious killer. And Pope Pius XII and the traitorous Rabbi Zolli ( later a convert to Catholicism) turned their backs on Italy's Jews in ways that had devastating, all-too-real consequences.

Epstein hints at the larger tragedy, having Max repeat the names of his Jewish workers like a solemn incantation, but the names remain only names, never outfitted with flesh. In the absence of genuine characterization, their presence here feels cheap, an unnecessary stunt intended to provide some ballast to the feather-light narrative.

The result is an edifice that, like La Vittoria, never rises to its full height. "Eighth Wonder" leaves us shaking our head at its fundamental lack of respect for the enormity, and the tragedy, of the history it claims to represent.

Saul Austerlitz's "Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video From the Beatles to the White Stripes " is out in March.