Queen Calafia's Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel by Kenneth Scambray, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: 2007
It probably comes as a surprise to many that there is such a thing as the Italian American novel in California.
Kenneth Scambray's new book makes clear that there is. And though it is true that the novels of John Fante rightly loom very large in this book, it is also true that several other California writers of Italian descent sufficiently balance out the Fante opus to make us realize that Italian American fiction in California weighs large and will weigh larger still in the future.
Thus we find in-depth analyses of classics like Jo Pagano's Golden Wedding and Lorenzo Madalena's Confetti for Gino, as well as lesser known, more contemporary novels like Dorothy Bryant's Miss Giardino and Steven Varni's The Inland Sea.
Confetti for Gino may illustrate Scambray's gift for analysis best. Its author, Lorenzo Madalena, was a product of San Diego's fishing community, an origin that heavily informs the novel.
But Scambray (as revealed in a lecture he gave before the AIHA/WRC two years ago) has also ferreted out Madalena's lesser known novel, The Invisible Glass, written under the pen name Loren Wahl to disguise Madalena's closeted homosexualty.
Thus, when Scambray analyzes Confetti for Gino, he perceives that beneath the alienation of the Italian Americans in the novel caught between Old World and New World values, there is the added weight of Madalena's own sympathy and empathy for outsiders derived from his homosexuality, and from his sensitivity to the more extreme alienation of African Americans. As Scambray puts it:
“Madalena's detailed descriptions of the food and folkways of the Sicilian community are intended to be his resistance to the overriding themes of assimilation and conformity of the 1950s.
As a student of African American history and as a gay Italian American, Madalena was acutely aware that social policy makers at the time refused to acknowledge the reality of Americans' diverse ethnic and sexual identity.” Thus, even though Madalena has his hero, Gino, try to rebel against his Sicilian heritage by defiantly proposing to an 'American' woman named Vicky, in the end Gino pairs up with the woman his mother has been proposing all along, the Sicilian Teresa.
Though this might seem to be a surrender to sentimentality, Scambray insists it is not. Madalena, he says, was “not so willing just yet to give in to the prevailing social consensus that demanded the erasure of a personal identity” that had been constructed so laboriously in Italian homes and immigrant neighborhoods.
If it is the critic's job to direct us to overlooked classics, then Queen Calafia's Paradise does precisely that, and much more.
Lawrence DiStasi
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