FALLING THROUGH THE NEW WORLD

Reeves’ 100-year saga follows an Italian clan’s travels and travails from the Old World to the New.

In World War I-era Italy, Anna Giove marries Vincenzo Desiderio, the scion of a prominent family in their little village. In 1922, Vincenzo sails to America to seek his fortune in the New World. After a period of years, Vincenzo, now a successful tailor in Philadelphia, sends for Anna. They have a daughter, Rosemarie, who marries Frank; they have three daughters, Kate being the eldest. The family members are haunted by the Catholic Church, both those who are in thrall to the institution and those who are trying (unsuccessfully) to break away. While Anna is timidly skeptical, her mother brings gifts to the friars in the monastery up on a mountain, convinced that she and they can somehow bribe God to spare Anna’s sister, who is dying from influenza. In the New World, Anna and Vincenzo’s (who now goes by Vincent) daughter, Rose, seems more attuned to relaxed American attitudes, but, in fact, despite her middle-class trappings, she is as deeply religious as her Italian grandmother. When her second daughter, Helen, gets pregnant out of wedlock, Rosa sends her away to have (and to give up) the baby, then makes up stories about how that daughter has a glamorous career in Hollywood. Rose’s brother, Vinnie, is a closeted gay man; by the convention of the time he is deemed a “confirmed bachelor.” These narratives are the saddest elements of this “novel in stories,” as Reeves describes the book. Even the more enlightened Kate is not untouched—but the novel’s last line assures the reader this is not a bad thing. Reeves is a successful published writer, as evidenced by the lyrical prose—here Kate struggles in spiritual confusion: “Overhead, a single bird’s insistent chirping sounds like heartbreak”; she finds succor in the “secret song of the ordinary that plays all around her.”

An absorbing story of ordinary people trying to find their way.