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Book review

It's an Italian-American thing

By TOM VALEO
Published March 15, 2005

Bill Tonelli has a point. While Italian-Americans have made significant contributions to filmmaking (Frank Capra, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese), acting (Robert De Niro, John Travolta, Al Pacino), singing (Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Frank Zappa), and other art forms, they aren't much of a presence when it comes to literature.

Sure, there are exceptions. Don DeLillo is an American master of the postmodern novel, and Gay Talese helped establish "new journalism" with his inside-the-Mafia chronicle, Honor Thy Father. Mario Puzo scored big with The Godfather, but chances are that novel would be all but forgotten if Coppola hadn't turned the story into a transcendent film trilogy. Italian-Americans have to admit that producing great literature is not exactly la cosa nostra (our thing). Why not?

In his introduction to The Italian American Reader, Tonelli floats some theories. Unlike Jewish culture, he says, Italian culture is not steeped in the written word. Only 42 percent of Italians claim to read at least a book a year, and that number is even smaller in southern Italy, which gave the United States the vast majority of its Italian immigrants.

Also, Tonelli says, Italians are famously social, preferring conversation to the isolation of reading and writing, and they live by the code of omerta - keeping silent about their secrets. "This discretion is a central pillar of southern Italian peasant culture itself, true for grandmas and gangsters alike," Tonelli writes. "Given this fundamental trait, is it any wonder that so far we've produced no Italian-American Portnoy? If Philip Roth had been one of ours, his grandmother would have chopped him up and buried the pieces under her tomato plants."

However, by editing a dense, 530-page anthology of writing by Italian-Americans, Tonelli would seem to be undercutting his own thesis, for The Italian American Reader demonstrates that there are a lot of descendants of Italian immigrants in this country who write with elegance, insight and authority. Tonelli, in fact, is one of them. He is the author of The Amazing Story of the Tonelli Family in America: Twelve Thousand Miles in a Buick in Search of Identity, Ethnicity, Geography, Kinship and Home, a memoir, currently out of print, that recounts the road trip he took to find Italian-Americans who share his last name.

The Italian American Reader opens, appropriately enough, with an excerpt from DeLillo's novel, Underworld. DeLillo's ethnic background has no apparent connection to his writing, and he may have been the famous writer Tonelli mentions who, claiming no sense of connection to his Italian heritage, initially rejected an invitation to be included in the anthology.

After DeLillo, the anthology resorts to fiction, memoir and poetry by writers who are less well-known. A few famous authors pop up from time to time. Tonelli includes a passage from Mario Puzo's 1964 novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, which the New York Times deemed a classic. Gay Talese makes an appearance with an excerpt from his memoir, Unto the Sons. Even comedian Ray Romano, star of the TV sit-com, Everybody Loves Raymond, is represented by an account of his father, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Raymond's father on the TV show.

Tonelli divides the anthology into broad, universal themes - Home, Mom, Death, Work, God, etc. - that provide a place for every conceivable subject. And the selections span more than 60 years, providing a sense of the scope, the variety, and the sheer vitality of writing by Italian-Americans.

But the anthology labors under the problem that plagues so many anthologies based on ethnic, geographical or sexual identity. The concept that supposedly unifies the selections eventually evaporates, leaving behind only the writing itself, which must stand on its own merits. That famous Italian-American author who initially refused to be included in Tonelli's anthology recognized that honoring writers for their surname rather than for their work is pointless at best, and potentially insulting.

In his introduction, Tonelli tries to justify the existence of the anthology by finding tendencies that run through the work of Italian-American writers, but the tendency he found most conspicuous was the way they have avoided writing about what it is like to be an Italian-American. This suggests that ethnic identity no longer matters much for Italian-Americans, whose strongest link to Italy may consist of nothing stronger than a fondness for pasta.

Tonelli has assembled some very enjoyable writing in The Italian American Reader, but the fact that the writers are all of Italian-American descent seems to be almost incidental.

-- Tom Valeo, half Italian-American himself, is a freelance writer who lives in St. Petersburg and writes frequently for the Times.

-- "The Italian American Reader," by Bill Tonelli, Perennial Currents, $15.95, 576 pages.

[Last modified March 14, 2005, 16:42:03]