by R. M. Berry

R. M. Berry's Leonardo's Horse delivers a new take on the famous Renaissance sculptor, painter, mathematician, and scientist: Leonardo as proto-slacker, enthusiastic yet easily distracted, full of ambitious ideas and plans, yet never quite bringing them to fulfillment. Leonardo da Vinci forms one plot axis of this ambitious first novel; the other revolves around a failed academic known here simply as 'R.' Caught in his 1955 Buick Roadmaster during an AIDS rally gone very wrong, R recounts both his own story and that of Leonardo's death in 1519. Originally the subject of his dissertation ('The Cultural Iconography of 'Leonardo da Vinci''), in R's hands Leonardo's story has morphed into a rollicking piece of fiction, as the Renaissance man's many disappointments mirror R's own. The author of a 1984 collection of short stories--Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart--Berry has a fine touch with contemporary details, and both present-day and Renaissance plots ably display his razor-sharp wit. Leonardo's Horse is a promising debut novel from a writer who dares to explore the complicated territory of failure.