Metropolitan Oratorio

Page 21 March–April 2009 and stingers that you wish Scibona had allowed himself the two or three other such skirmishes for which his narrative elements seem to call. What he tends to offer instead, with an admirable combination of wit and pathos, are the key players’ memories of how they came to leave Italy. These provide some of his sharpest quips about the immigrant impulse (“Nobody ever came here to have a good time”), and naturally, the most disquieting reminiscences are those of Costanza Marini. Still, her colloquies with her husband’s ghost can feel coy, even irrelevant. So too, while Rocco and Ciccio both leave Cleveland behind, following that August day, neither man summons up a coherent recognition of the transience of his American home. There’s nothing like the clear consequences of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), which eviscerates Italian American Queens and scatters its offspring across mapless, apocalyptic Nevada. Rather, the more revealing predecessor for Scibona may be, again, Sorrentino. His Steelwork (1970), too, presents a portrait of an immigrant enclave, an impasto of the Brooklyn working poor, hilarious and heartbreaking. Yet while the novel covers a busy decade and a half, ending in 1951, it has no unifying story. Nonetheless, Steelwork, nearly four decades after its publication, remains in print, often read, taught, discussed; it’s showing the earmarks of a masterpiece. Thus, despite my small misgivings over how Scibona has arranged the Italian playing cards of his debut, I wouldn’t be surprised if over time his novel earned a similar degree of esteem. John Domini’s current novel is ATomb on the Periphery . In 2009, he’ll publish a selection of his essays and reviews, The Sea-God’s Herb. Metropolitan Oratorio John Domini The End Salvatore Scibona Graywolf Press http://www.graywolfpress.org 304 pages; cloth, $24.00 The late Gilbert Sorrentino could always be counted on to speak the truth about some overpraised dud of a novel, and nothing spurred him to the attack like a clumsy style. An outstanding case is his savaging of John Gardner, whose writing Sorrentino termed “amazing in its witlessness.” But then there’s the kind of writing brought off by Salvatore Scibona in his debut novel The End. Somewhere Sorrentino must be smiling, to see sentences like these—hardheaded yet lovely, precise yet inventive—floating up his way: The opposite of to die is to have a family . …Lina was a child. She lacked the natural cruelty that a conversance with the marital act encouraged one to refine. The city was a mammoth trash heap— even the lake was brown—but it was an honorable place. It put pretty to one side. Night, for children, was more a place than a time. Scibona has a lot more where that came from. Another reviewer could pluck a handful of quite different yet equally delicious turns of phrase, combining skewed aphorism, urbanity with all the senses open, Roman Catholic arcana and Southern Italian superstition, and plain old perspicuity about the human animal as it ages and changes. Physical description, too, proves on the money and felicitous. The End opens with a bravura five-line sketch of the baker Rocco LaGrassa, concluding with the ripe analogy: “a man in the shape of a lightbulb.” Not surprisingly, this novel arrives with unusually impressive blurbs, from Annie Dillard for one (she calls The End “[f]ull of wisdom, consequence, and grace”).Another endorsement, from ZZ Packer, makes the daunting comparison to Saul Bellow— daunting, yet notably fitting. Granted, The End isn’t set in Chicago, where Bellow drew his inspiration. It’s Cleveland for Scibona, but he fleshes out a scrabbling immigrant Cleveland, an Italian American neighborhood he calls “Elephant Park.” Both Augie March and his author would recognize the place, and not for nothing does the new novel’s central date fall in 1953, the year that Augie’s Adventures saw print. Scibona knows the big shoulders on which he’s set up his own tuner, the better to bring in his own metropolitan oratorio. Those multiple vocals include only a secondary part for Rocco and his bakery.The one-man shop may recall another classic of the mid...