FICTION: The EndBy Salvatore Scibona Cape, 294pp, £16.99
DEEP AT the rich, beating heart of Salvatore Scibona’s mesmerising debut novel is the image of a father attempting to introduce his little boy to a food eaten back home in the old country. The child, born in the US and no doubt living the life of an American boy, gags and spits it out. This dilemma shapes the many stories Scibona presents with the skill of a magician pulling ever increasing lengths of coloured silks from a hat: the immigrant comes to the new country but can never quite shake free of the old. In the US he remains a foreigner; back home he has become an outsider, a distant memory for the family he left behind.
It is not only persistent memory that has first- and second-generation settlers from Europe wondering who they are and who they have become; it is also language. A bewildered father looks on as his American-sounding, if Sicilian-looking, son carries on a conversation with his own, newly arrived, elderly father, using fragments of half-remembered phrases no one ever taught him – or, if they had, they have forgotten.
It mostly takes place in Ohio, in the chaotic world of Elephant Park, so named because an escaped circus animal once tried to drink from a frozen river, fell through the ice and drowned. A local reporter duly recorded the event. Now there is the type of image that would inspire an entire novel; it may well have inspired this one.
Scibona is both playful and deadly serious. There are many elements contributing to the jaunty glory that is his storytelling; aside from the imaginative daring and depth of human experience, the longing and the regret, are the exuberant lightness with which he uses language and the wry tone that consistently elevates his inspired anecdotal brew to surrealist clarity. Images flutter like so many butterflies, although his intent is deliberate and his themes serious, often tragic.
This novel of lives opens with a physical description of one of the central characters so detailed that it acts as a Puccini overture: “He was five-feet one-inch tall in street shoes, bearlike in his round and jowly face, hulking in his chest and shoulders, nearly just as stout around the middle, but hollow in the hips, and lacking a proper can to sit on (though he was hardly ever known to sit), and wee in the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb.”
He is Rocco La Grassa, a hard-working baker and father of three sons. He expects little from life and gets even less. His shop is open all the time, even after his wife leaves him, taking their sons. The years pass, and one day he is told that his middle son has died in Korea while serving in the US army.
Rocco closes the shop and sets off on an odyssey worthy of Leopold Bloom. The presence of Joyce lingers throughout, but the influences that most strongly assert themselves are those of John Dos Passos and Henry Roth; hints of the freefall of the best of magic realism also surface at times. Scibona summons the carnival atmosphere created by the annual street processions of August 15th, Assumption Day, the date on which Catholics celebrate the Virgin Mary’s ascension into heaven. It is 1953. The statue being carried shoulder high is suitably rakish, encrusted with jewels. The crowds, including Chinese and Jews, swell as one of the characters, Ciccio, a smart-alec son of a doting father and a mother who ran away, announces: “I’m bored. Why do we have to be so goddamn early for everything? This guy is going to squash me. Why am I telling you this? You’ll laugh.”
Everyone is searching and seeking; some, such as the poor baker, Rocco, suffer. Others, such as the formidable Mrs Marini, gradually come to dominate not only the narrative but also the lives of several of the characters, as well as the women to whom she provides professional services. “For thirteen years after the death of her husband, Constanza Marini had lived alone. She was now sixty-eight. Death beckoned. And that was really too bad, because, having been anxious in her youth, disappointed in her maturity, and then desolate in middle age, she had recently made a conspicuous turn: In what she expected were her final years, she found herself in possession of powers she had long ago given up hope of acquiring. It was a windfall. She had become happy – no, exuberant.”
The old lady has power; she dresses in black and has for years. “She hadn’t set foot outside her house in any other color since 1915.” Her occupation, as a backstreet abortionist, pits her against the Madonna figure being feted. This is but one of Scibona’s many subtle ironies. There is no doubt that Mrs Marini, having been mild in her youth, is now all- powerful. It is she who sets out to shape some of the other female characters, such as Lina, who speaks “good Ohio English and court Italian” because Mrs Marini had coached her “from her early girlhood over school-day suppers”; the determined old lady “had peeled the dialect right off Lina’s tongue”.
The Endevokes a claustrophobic immigrant world busily pushing its way though life within the confines of the greater US, seething at its edges. The old world does not release its hold. Yet late in the novel when Ciccio falls asleep on a train journey and arrives in Chicago, Illinois, he proudly tells himself he is from Ohio.
As the crowds cheer the Madonna, inside a barber shop Ciccio beats Mrs Marini and the barber at cards. Darker deeds are alluded to: there is a possibility that the lonely old jeweller, whose hobby is copying down letters preserved by the families of men who fought in the American Civil War, may be a murderer, perhaps even a serial killer. A father watches as two black women leave a house: “The younger was unsteady on her legs.” The man stops and looks at the women, as does his son. The father wonders what was going on; the reader already knows.
“Eventually, he would be dead,” the father ponders. “The kid would grow up and ask himself someday, Who am I?” Identity is a constant; here are characters caught between cultures. Scibona uses narrative as a prism: he is far more concerned with his characters asking questions than he is with him attempting to answer them. The generations are caught up in a crazy dance. A man glances at the father he has not seen for years and decides that “his father was much bigger than this”. That same old man then says to his grandson, “I told you to wear a scarf,” speaking the words in dialect, to which the boy’s response is a telling: “What did he say?”
It is a culture where part of a woman’s life experience is to travel across the ocean to marry a man she has never seen. Lives and personal stories are all lovingly, engagingly and expertly braided into a confident, impressionistic work that, defying both time and death, shimmers with flamboyance, possibility and beguiling artistry.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times and author of Second Readings: 52 – From Beckett to Black Beauty,published by Liberties Press
