How does one transcend location, family, nationality? How does one defy one's destiny, when it is explicit, and expected, and five hundred years in the making?

In Martha McPhee's novel, L'America, the excruciating answer is that one does not. Love, first love, beautiful and intoxicating in all its dizzying ecstasy, does not overcome all obstacles--instead, it augments them.

McPhee's work chronicles the love affair of the handsome Cesare, born to the well-established Cellini family of the Italian town of Città , and cherubic, blonde, blue-eyed Beth, a willful American raised on a rural commune in Pennsylvania . Intended to take over his family's banking business as twenty generations of Cellini men have done before him, young Cesare falls for life, unbound and unscripted, the moment he meets Beth.

On the Greek island of Páros , Cesare is a beautiful stranger illuminated by the sun, as if lit only for Beth. And for both, the instant in which their eyes meet is the moment "of recognition of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the moment when coincidence--Fate?--offers up the answer to a question that hasn't yet been asked; the moment when love finds its object and two lives are bound together forever."

The beauty and tragedy of McPhee's novel lay precisely in this unexpected, inexplicable, eternal love, a love that spans two worlds while failing to unite them. The lovers' thwarted romance thus becomes the emblem of a futile attempt to reconcile Italian tradition with American ambition and its dream of infinite possibility.

Setting the lovers' story against the backdrop of Pennsylvanian apple orchards, the incessant bustle of New York City, and the gentle allure of the Italian countryside, McPhee depicts a love that is subject to the ravages of place--rather than to those of time. It is fitting, therefore, that when Cesare visits Claire, the commune established by Beth's father in honor of her deceased mother, he cannot but acknowledge that Beth, "bundled up in a sweatshirt and sweatpants...made sense here." He, with his meticulously pressed jeans, does not.

Ultimately, love offers few means of bridging the gap between two lives that exist an ocean apart. In fact, it seems that for the two to exist as one--the only way they can "save each other from their lives"--is for one lover to attack and capture the other. The potential solution, a selfish and tenuous one at best, is articulated in Cesare's declaration that he had once "wanted to steal Beth, protect her from her dreams, make her his own. A thief, he had wanted to rob her of ambition and desire."

Beth and Cesare's love is foiled by culture and circumstance--from childhood ties, to professional aspirations, to the devastating events of September 11. At the same time, however, it spurns the fetters imposed upon it by the passage of time. Moving with fluid facility between past and present, McPhee constructs L'America as a multi-generational patchwork of old world and new, an examination of cultural, familial, and personal identity. Even more defining of her work is her exploration of the human element that transforms love into "a victory over time." The novel, at its best and most poignant, is an attempt to portray the rare specimen of "love [that] steals from death. The illusion of immortality for an instant blooms, a beautiful flower, and everything that is here is here and all that is, truly is."

At its core, L'America is as much an exploration of the turns of fate that shape its protagonists' lives as it is a study of the ways in which these lives are predetermined by the history that precedes them. Far from a literary behemoth, the novel is a quiet, scenic portrayal of life simply being lived. Its progress runs alongside that of its characters, characters who "[greet] each other with smiles and stories of their tangled dramas as they have for so many years and generations, same as they do everywhere, ordinary people engaged in ordinary lives that amount to everything."