The young Mario Puzo read Dostoevsky in the local library and dreamed of “becoming an artist and escaping the ghetto world in which he had been born”. His own early novels tended to portray Italian immigrant families as “honest” and “hardworking”; The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964) is “a classic of Italian American literature”. By the late 1960s Puzo found himself middle‐aged and $20,000 in the red. On his own admission, he was “tired of being an artist”. In 1969 he published The Godfather.
I draw here on a 28‐page essay on Italian American novelists by Fred Gardaphe, Professor of English at Columbia College, Chicago. This is one of 27 contributions to a book which is described by the editor as “a critical history written in the form of personal essays” on what he calls “the people of inbetweenness”. Thomas Belmonte (1946‐95), an anthropologist, writes about “The Contradictions of Italian American Identity”. The eminent literary critic Frank Lentricchia contributes an excerpt from his autobiographical work The Edge of Night (1994), about which Professor Gardaphe writes towards the end of “The Evolution of Italian American Autobiography”. Liana Miuccio, a photographer, presents a photographic essay about her family. Thomas Ferraro provides a transcription of a telephone conversation with Camille Paglia (“Italian Catholic in My Bones”). A piece on Madonna is subtitled “The Postmodern Diva as Maculate Conception”.
The essays have been arranged under the headings “Identity”, “Roots, traditions, and the Italian American life‐world”, “Writing as an Italian American”, and “The Italian American presence in the arts”. Many of the pieces are supplemented by scholarly notes, suggestions for further reading, and a “canon” of important works or people. The book has two appendices, containing a chronology of the Italian American experience, 1492‐1998, and a “cultural lexicon” giving extended definitions of key terms (for example bello, famiglia, Mafia, simpatico). Between 1880 and 1914 a quarter of the population of Italy emigrated, mainly from the south. Ellis Island became known as L’isola delle lacrime (the island of tears).
In a 100‐page essay on “Italian American musical culture” Robert Connolly and the editor analyse Frank Sinatra’s complicated personality in terms of the “Italian American territorial self”. Al Martino, who had a big hit with “Spanish Eyes” in 1965, has said that he has experienced “career problems” since he played the Sinatra figure in Francis Coppola’s film of The Godfather (1972). Tony Bennett (Anthony Benedetto) expressed “in a big‐city‐neighbourhood voice the hysterical search for the American Dream”. Professor D’Acierno begins a 130‐page contribution on Italian Americans and cinema with an analysis of Coppola’s Godfather trilogy as a fusion of the gangster film with opera. Professor Paglia says she loves the Godfather films for their “ceremonialism of behavior”, and celebrates the Italian “tolerance for violence”. In “Italian American women writers” the novelist and critic Helen Barolini accuses Paglia of promoting masculine values and stereotypical views of Italians, and denounces Simone de Beauvoir as a hypocrite. As a role model Ms Barolini proposes Grazia Deledda (1871‐1936), “a great writer and a happily married mother”.
I found this a fascinating and enlightening experiment. The book is well‐bound and handsomely presented, but I noted a number of minor errors (Sarah Vaughan is here as “Vaughn”, Francis Fukuyama as “Frances”). Professor D’Acierno has a predilection for expressions like “post‐exilic” and “dilemmatic” and “folklorization”. The work is intended for the general reader, students, and “teachers of multicultural studies”. In a relatively brief, angry broadside Richard Gambino suggests that proponents of multiculturalism tend to see Italian Americans as the evil progeny of Columbus, and deplores the stigma of “amoral familism” which continues to be attached to Italian Americans and to recent immigrant groups like Mexicans and Koreans. The whole point of the traditional Italian custom of comparragio (godparenthood) was to foster community through the merging of family networks. “Fantasy‐based Mafia sensationalism” was “crowned by The Godfather novel and films”.
