Renato the Painter

Eugene Mirabelli¿s eighth novel is the story of a seventy-year-old painter taking his last shot. Recently retired from teaching, and knowing that he¿s a better painter than anyone around (but without having had a Newbury Street gallery in thirty years), Renato is vital, defiant, and passionate in his determination. But he doesn¿t have time to be a nice old man. He¿s living alone in his Boston loft studio -- painting, painting, painting. Years ago art critics saw great promise in his...
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Eugene Mirabelli¿s eighth novel is the story of a seventy-year-old painter taking his last shot. Recently retired from teaching, and knowing that he¿s a better painter than anyone around (but without having had a Newbury Street gallery in thirty years), Renato is vital, defiant, and passionate in his determination. But he doesn¿t have time to be a nice old man. He¿s living alone in his Boston loft studio -- painting, painting, painting. Years ago art critics saw great promise in his work and his reputation began to grow. Now the only things that have grown are his children, who have left home. He¿s at odds with his wife, Alba, and doesn¿t get along with his on-again off-again love, Zoe. Then a young woman with spiky black hair and jewelry on her face crashes in his workplace with her little boy. Life was already complicated (everybody knows that Zoe is the mother of his third child, though that child was brought up by his Alba, his wife), and it only gets more complicated for this grumpy man of outsize appetites, and enormous humanity. It all began seventy years before on the snowy night when he was left in a laundry basket at the Back Bay door of a large, vigorous Italian-American family...