All these momma’s boys undermine popular notions of Italian machismo and suggest unexplored relations between old-country...
A genial debut from Kirkus reviewer Ermelino, a reporter for InStyle, celebrates neighborhood culture, testifies to the power of women in a peasant-based society, and smartly counters the prevailing stereotypes of Italian-Americans from the not-so-mean streets of New York’s Little Italy.
The Italian mommas in Ermelino’s three linked narratives let no men oppress them, but rely on the power of their patroness, the Black Madonna of Viggiano, to solve their earthly dilemmas. Teresa Sabatini, who lives with her young son on Spring Street while her merchant marine husband is fighting the war at sea, endures the constant questions of her nosy neighbors. When her beloved son cripples himself playing Tarzan on the fire escape, Teresa looks to her elusive husband for help and comes up with a double miracle. The second story, set in the ’30s, a decade earlier, explains how Magdalena Caparetti, a young beauty from the old country, manages to snag eligible widower Amadeo Pavese, a successful American merchant visiting his relatives in Italy. With the help of the Virgin’s magic, Amodeo’s aunt and uncle, who rely on his monthly check, combine folklore and foodlore to arrange a suitable match. In the third tale, both Magdalena and Teresa lend their cunning to their haughty neighbor Antoinette Mangiacarne, whose son, Jumbo, once their own sons’ playmate, wants to move away from what passes for his home in the 1960s—he lives with his mother in the same building as his five married sisters and tends bar in the neighborhood in order to settle a bad gambling debt—and marry a Jewish girl from Long Island. The mother-son struggle and the inter-ethnic culture clash result in some fine, and finely climactic, low comedy.
All these momma’s boys undermine popular notions of Italian machismo and suggest unexplored relations between old-country ways and new-world realities: a welcome antidote to “fuhggeddaboudit.”Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87166-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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