[In the following review, Peterson asserts that The Light in the Piazza fails to engage the reader.]

Elizabeth Spencer is a writer of distinction and delicacy. Cradled in that South which is providing us with so much of the best in contemporary American literature, she has produced three novels and a number of short stories fine enough to place her well beyond the honorable but inconclusive category of women novelists as such. With her last book—The Voice at the Back Door—she emerged as a notable talent. It is therefore with high expectation that one opens this latest of her tales, the prizewinning novella with the felicitous title of The Light in the Piazza. But before the close one becomes aware that this story, so held down by its restraint of manner and emotion that its wings seem to have been clipped, is never quite airborne.

On the face of it, The Light in the Piazza is about a crucial confrontation of two Americans with an Italian family in present-day Florence. It is a story of innocents—or, if you will, of innocence—abroad. A comfortably well-off, upper-middle class mother and daughter from Winston-Salem encounter and become involved with an unarguably middle-middle class young Florentine and his parents. As a chiaroscuro sketch of custom, belief and morality revealed at the confluence of two cultural streams, Miss Spencer's brief novel need not be abashed by inevitable comparison with its famous Jamesian predecessor. But as portraiture, it cannot be compared. The innocence of the girl, Clara Johnson, whose problem is so happily solved by her mother, is of a quite different order from that of poor Daisy Miller. It is Clara, rather than Daisy, whose fever should have been lethal; Clara, rather than Daisy, who carried within her the seed of tragedy.

Like some lovely peach that the frost has bitten, Clara Johnson hangs blushing but doomed on the tree of life. Sixteen years before we meet her, she was kicked in the head by her pony. Now, radiant and ripe to look upon, she still has a mental age of ten. Such a theme as this, with all its painful implications both for the mother and the girl herself, should by its very nature be predominant. Yet because of the author's deliberate understatement or because of her greater preoccupation with the interplay of two worlds, she seems to be giving it much less than the full power and scope it demands. This is what pales the light on the piazza of her imagination and turns it singularly and disappointingly cold.

If Miss Spencer's story proves anything, it proves that sheer skill, sheer mastery of craft, is not enough, for its telling leaves nothing to be desired. From the moment when we find Mrs. Johnson and her daughter Clara on the Piazza di Michel Angelo and the same breeze that lifts Clara's pretty beribboned hat from her head blows the handsome Fabrizzio Naccarelli, who retrieves and returns it into the Johnsons' life, to the moment of triumph a few weeks later, there is not a breath of implausibility in the smoothly flowing tale. Yet this very plausibility is somehow implausible. Asked to believe in the love affair between a smart Italian shopkeeper and an American girl three years his senior, who still plays parcheesi with herself on rainy afternoons, regards her suitor as a playmate and remains as unaware of her sexual instincts as he is aware of his, the reader finds it both uncanny and unreal. They cannot be pawns both in the hands of their parents and in those of the author, too. If it can be accepted that a mother will gamble as coolly as Mrs. Johnson for what she hopes will be her daughter's happiness and that a father will gamble as coolly as the senior Naccarelli for the future of his son, the untested, unrealized and, indeed, unimaginable relationship between their children is not acceptable. Out of what in real life could only have been a macabre situation, Miss Spencer has spun a fiction too worldly, too shiny, too neat, to touch the heart.