Michael Fitzgerald Pietà

Pietà, 2021 is Michael Fitzgerald’s second novel. The Pacific Room, 2017, his first, disrupted time and place and played with intersecting narrative voices, and in Pietà he again employs this technique: Rumer Godden’s use of the device came to mind as I read. Like Godden, Fitzgerald’s work considers the intersection of cultures, of religion, of race, and relationships across families, continents and time.

 showed Fitzgerald has a talent for evoking place, and in this facility is again evident. A particular work of art and its place in art history provides each of the novels is Lucy, the daughter of an Australian woman who, while staying in her order’s Rome convent in the 1970s, abruptly left her religious community to become a sculptor. She had been present in the Vatican when the Australian-Hungarian Laszlo Toth attacked Michelangelo’s , 1498–99, and the event upends her belief and her religious vocation. We are told Lucy’s relationship with her mother was always difficult, and distant; that she is grieving her mother’s death, that Lucy abandoned her own studies in art when her mother was dying.