Following more than a decade after his Scotiabank Giller Prize–nominated debut Summer Gone, David Macfarlane’s second novel – a meditation on beauty in art, history, nature, landscape, and relationships – moves back and forth in time and strings together multiple narratives, often in a contrived and confusing way.

In the small Tuscan town of Pietrabella in the late 1960s, Anna, a young sculptor obsessed with marble and Michelangelo, begins a love affair with Oliver, a Canadian student. Their four months together end with Oliver returning – somewhat inexplicably – to his home in Cathcart, Ontario. Unbeknownst to him, Anna is pregnant; their daughter is one of the novel’s narrators.

There is potential richness in the central story of a family separated by time, geography, fear, and misunderstanding, but the author undermines it by frequently interrupting the main plot with tangential storylines. In one subplot, set in the 1920s, Grace and Argue Barton meet Julian Morrow, the owner of several Italian quarries. Morrow charms the Bartons into installing a luxurious marble pool at their Cathcart estate.

Lino Cavatore, the survivor of an accident at one of Morrow’s quarries, is assigned to design the pool, which is eventually bought by the Bartons’ neighbours, the Hughsons. Years later, having settled in Cathcart, Lino discovers the abandoned baby Oliver and leaves him by the side of the pool for the Hughsons to find and ultimately adopt. This digressive storyline, along with a number of others, interferes with the reader’s ability to engage with the primary story and characters.

The Figures of Beauty soars as a history of sculpture, taxonomy of marble, and elucidation of art as “an ongoing song, to which centuries of voices contribute.” Sadly, this aesthetic flight does not make up for the lack of a lucid narrative and fully developed characters – fatal flaws that Macfarlane’s considerable skill with evocative language and imagery cannot overcome.