ITALIAN PLEASURES
By David Leavitt & Mark Mitchell
Chronicle Books. 155 pp. $16.95

HOUSEBOAT ON THE SEINE
A Memoir
By William Wharton
Newmarket Books. 211 pp. $22.95

Read the First Chapter of Italian Pleasures

Go to Chapter One

Continental Drifters

DAVID LEAVITT has now settled for good, with his fellow expatriate, Mark Mitchell, in Italy. They don't tell us exactly where, but in any case it's a "lived, not visited" life under a sky that they believe no other country in the world can match. William Wharton, when he was still a moderately successful painter and hadn't yet written Birdy, was seized with the notion of living with his wife and three children on a wooden houseboat on the Seine, about 10 miles west of Paris. It was, in fact, his family that insisted: "Now, this would be exciting living, not the way it is in dirty old Paris." It sounded like an invitation to leisure. But his book demonstrates that leisure can be the hardest work of all.

In Italian Pleasures Leavitt and Mitchell write delicate vignettes, turn and turn about, with passages every now and then from earlier visitors -- Ruskin, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, D.H. Lawrence, Carlo Levi, Mary McCarthy. This works well, since in Italian cities past and present interpenetrate. And there's another dimension in time -- the tiny essays, each catching its own moment, look back to the time when the two now-thirty-something authors first arrived from New York. They didn't know any Italian then, tried to order cold cappuccino, marveled at the sweet summer grass round Keats's grave, the pigeons in Venice, the clotheslines in Naples where laundry dries "ebulliently, in that precarious world of shutters and geraniums and ochre walls and cats and terra cotta and swallows that breathes above the old streets."

Ten years later, they're seasoned residents, and yet Italy can still confound time. As he sits writing in a cafe in the Piazza Navona, Leavitt can still believe that "my mother is not dead, I have not had to endure the pleasures and vagaries of success, I have never owned a house or been sued." In ancient Italy, he recalls, nymphs turned into trees. "The world is less pliable today, yet I am convinced that what little of that old transformative power remains lingers in the Roman piazzas."

With its quotations and its recipes and its airy pen-and-ink illustrations, Italian Pleasures seems, at first, to be just what it says. But, very nearly at the end, Leavitt suddenly tells us the story of the Green family. In 1994 the Greens, tourists from California, were driving in a rented car from Salerno to Calabria. This is bandit country, though the Greens didn't know it. Their son, 7 years old, was shot and killed. The parents made an immediate decision to donate their dead child's organs to Italian hospitals for transplant. It was, effectively, the total reverse of the vendetta. Here Leavitt's restrained tone darkens the atmosphere of the book, which had seemed, like the old sundials, to record only the brightest hours.

I FOUND Italian Pleasures beguiling, but faintly disturbing. With William Wharton's Houseboat on the Seine I felt at home from the first page. He won't, I'm sure, mind my saying (since I am an old bargewoman) that he can hardly be considered, and in fact wouldn't claim to be, a boat-lover; he calls his barge "it," and not until page 196 do we find that she's the "Ste. Maria Therese." Wharton paints her name out, in any case, after a dispute with the Ponts et Chaussees. But he wants to live in France, he tells us, if only to keep his kids away from American television, and he wants to live on this particular boat. This means launching into an always good-natured but fiercely determined war with the French authorities, the French language, and the weather.

His boat is moored in a branch of the Seine, so there's won't be too much wash from mainstream traffic. But -- though the seller didn't mention it -- her planks are half rotten, and before he can move in, she goes down. Fortunately he has reliable allies, even apart from his reliable son Matt. He's able to call on the genius of M. Teurnier, a salvage engineer from nearby Port Marly. In his sixties, about five feet tall, M. Teurnier takes genial control of everything. Bien: He'll raise the boat, but the owner must remove anything floating, or his pumps will jam. "I flash my light around the dark interior. My God, the place is filled with junk: floating doors, cabinet doors, real doors; pillows, mattresses, papers, furniture, all floating in the dark . . ." After a day's hard labor and a night's sickness from polluted river-water, he manages to get as far as the local cafe, "the same one Alfred Sisley painted several times when the river was in full flood. I'll never look at those paintings in the same way, beautiful as they are."

M. Teurnier has the bizarre scheme of mounting the original wooden boat on a steel canal barge, (or rather half a barge, the crew cabin and cargo section, all that's left of it in the breaker's yard). He creates a kind of double-decked monster, cutting out new portholes with an oxyacetylene lamp. It's not surprising that the houseboat community is rather slow to welcome it.

That was about 25 years ago, and, like Leavitt and Mitchell, Wharton looks back at his earlier self almost with disbelief. His labors -- although he wouldn't call them this -- are heroic. The companion ladder is too steep, the industrial sander he rents runs away with him, the gangplank gives all kinds of trouble, then in the spring floods the boat slips her moorings and he has to improvise new bollards on the spot. He's not just giving us his impressions, he's telling us how it was. For Wharton the world seems to be born again every morning. You have to feel as he does; there's no other way to read him.

MEANTIME everything, down to the last chain-link connector, has to be paid for, and to do this Wharton needs to paint and to sell his paintings. Another attraction of this absorbing book is the contrast, not a simple one, between his work as an amateur handyman and as an artist. "I paint away all morning . . . I discover how important sap green and raw sienna are to the painting of water, that is, Seine river water." This is the voice of someone who is enviably ready to learn.

One might envy, too, his instinct for friendship and his gloriously obstinate persistence. One can't feel that Wharton's nameless craft will ever look elegant. But it's home, and it floats.

Penelope Fitzgerald is a novelist and biographer whose novel "Offshore" was about life with her children on a sailing-barge moored on the Thames.