In PALLADIO, Jonathan Dee's cynical new novel, the author suggests that our culture is too informed by a conflagration of media messages and keen images that, despite their banality, are designed to influence our tastes and shape our values. He uses consumerism and the advertising industry as a backdrop for examining what he perceives as our 'all-dysfunctional' culture. To make his points, he has given us an eccentric and interesting cast of characters who truly are 'characters.'

Molly Howe is an enigmatic teenager with all the makings of a femme fatale. She is a beautiful, smart girl but has no conception of how cause and effect connect to her actions or the impact they have in the lives of others. She is perfectly blasé about her affair with a married man and, when they are caught, she cannot comprehend why she is banished from her home and forced to leave her provincial hometown of Ulster, New York.

She makes her way to Berkley, California, where her older brother lives a communal life among a group of religious fanatics, of which he is the guru. They take her in, give her shelter and food, and leave her on her own. Occasionally, she sneaks into a class to watch a film or hear a lecture that interests her. No one seems to notice her or questions her right to be there, until she meets a young art student named John Wheelwright. They fall in love, set up housekeeping together, and for all practical purposes appear to be on the road to a blissful life together. Then Molly disappears.

Fast-forward 10 years. John has a successful career in New York as a commercial artist at one of the world's largest cutting edge advertising firms. He has a girlfriend, an apartment, friends, and an appealing life. Then one day he meets the successful and iconoclastic Mal Osbourne, who has decided to revolutionize their medium: "Our culture propagates no values outside of the peculiar sort of self-negation implied in the wry smile of irony, the way we remove ourselves from ourselves in order to be insulated from the terrible emptiness of the way we live now. That wry smile mocks self-knowledge, mocks the idea of right and wrong and mocks the notion that art is worth making at all. We will create advertising, and that advertising will be paid for by clients: but the advertising will be unlike anything the world has ever seen before."

He explains that he is creating a new kind of company to be housed in an ante-bellum mansion called Palladio, in Charlottesville, Virginia. His final pitch convinces John that this is an opportunity he can't resist --- "The language of advertising is the language of American life: American art, American politics, American media, American law, American business. By changing that language, we will, perforce, change the world." Everything works out better than expected and after few years Palladio becomes the most prestigious advertising agency in the world.

Then, like an old nightmare from the nether realms, Molly reappears. She is as elusive as ever, but despite her idiosyncratic personality, Osbourne falls in love with her, installs her in his private living quarters, and from that point on Palladio is doomed.

Dee has given us a riveting story and raises issues to provoke readers into rethinking some of the most familiar messages and images that bombard us every day. With a deft hand and a visionary spirit he calls into question the way consumerism shapes our lives and the world in which we live. He doesn't solve any problems but he asks the right questions, and that too is important.

   --- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum

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