Dennis Barone,America Trattabili

Reviewed by: Eleonora Boscolo, University of Connecticut, USA

Dennis Barone's America Trattabili is a delightful investigation of how various Italian American authors, from Pascal D'Angelo to Louis Forgione and John Fante, reflect in their writings the challenging negotiation of their identity between Italy and America. A main goal of Barone's book is also to broaden the audience of the lesser-known Italian American authors who he considers in his discourse.

The first chapter of America Trattabili is dedicated to the cinematic representation of Italian Americans in early American films. The theme of ‘The Italian as other’ is the recurrent topic of the films analyzed by Dennis Barone. Through a close look at iconic films such as The Immigrant and Poor Little Peppina, Barone demonstrates that when it came to the theme of immigration the early American film industry did not advocate ‘the perfection and conservation of differences, but their silencing and removal from cultural discourse’ (p. 37), thus promoting a ‘prejudicial and malicious’ (p. 37) conception of Americanness.

The second and the third chapters investigate the position of the Italian American writer, giving particular attention to Pascal D'Angelo, writer and labor worker. D'Angelo is an emblematic figure of the situation of the early Italian American writer. Although his autobiography Son of Italy ‘contradicts the standard notion that Southern Italian immigrants were anti-intellectual, anti-bookish, and provincial’ (p. 51), his dedication to writing caused D’Angelo to be marginalized from his fellow immigrants. As a marginal man rather than an assimilated American, D'Angelo ‘remained on the margins of American Society in order to tell of the agonies of the immigrants’ (p. 41).

Chapter 4 takes into consideration the sentiments of anger and guilt in the trauma of immigration and its generational transfer in the works of Louis Forgione, mainly Reamer Lou and The River Between. Barone investigates beyond previous studies on the sentiments of anxiety and depression in the immigrant's literature and finds that the immigrant's anger is often expressed rather than repressed and that this anger is often passed on through generations, it ‘survives far beyond the generation of authors who came of age in the 1930s’ (p. 85).

Barone dedicates Chapters 5 and 6 to John Fante and to the image of Italy reflected in his works and to his experience as screenwriter, respectively. As for the image of Italy in Italian American works, Barone bases his study on sociologist Robert Orsi's idea that ‘tradition is a complex cultural process which does not discover, but creates the past in response to the needs and dilemmas of the present’ and therefore that Italian immigrants ‘invented a homeland that never existed and used this invention as a fantasy to assuage their pain and as a stick to discipline their children’ (p. 87). Looking back to Italy, like John Fante does, is certainly another way to negotiate America. In Chapter 6, Barone shows how ‘Fante's career and writings illustrate and complicate standard notions of the writer in Hollywood and how one Italian American author navigated the blurred intersections of art and commerce’ (p. 123).

Chapter 7 presents the 1943 novel Golden Wedding by writer Joe Pagano. Barone titles the chapter ‘Pagano's gold’ because he sees the novel as Pagano's best work. In the story of 50 years in the life of an Italian American couple, Barone sees genius in a style that combined ‘an uplifting narrative of ethnic particularity and national generality’ (p. 122) and countered stereotypes. Its patriotism and defense of Italian Americans combine with themes of family, state and nation, making Golden Wedding not only an ethnic Italian American novel but also a Californian and American novel.

Chapter 8 deals with what Barone calls ‘The literature of the sprawl,’ the narratives that include ‘poorly planned urban and suburban growth’ (p. 141) and in particular with Joseph Papaleo's work. Papaleo, like many Italian American authors wrote of the ‘limits of assimilation and the pervasive, though evolving, nature of ethnic identity’ (p. 135) and he ‘wrestled with his identity both as a writer and an ethnic American’ (p. 151) but unlike many other Italian American writers he added the geographical issue of the American suburb to his work. The post-World-War-II suburban environment is criticized as a place that steals one's identity and homogenizes too much.

The next chapter, entitled ‘The black hand becomes the big box’ demonstrates that the poetry of Philadelphia Italian American authors Frank Spiziri and JT Barbarese resisted assimilation and homogenization to mainstream America. As ‘little Italies’ disappear, Italian American identity remains in their poetry:

just as Spiziri kept Italy alive in the ethnic neighborhood South Philadelphia, and by doing so fostered community and resisted homogenization, so Joe Barbarese keeps Little Italy alive in multi-cultural America and by doing so forces us to question alienating forms of community created by a corporate culture that raids ethnicity for a patina of nostalgia. (p. 157)

Chapter 10, ‘Always different,’ deals with Italian American women writers transgressing gender boundaries and neighborhood limits. The chapter investigates the reasons for the late appearance of an Italian American women's literary tradition and traces its evolution from a literature by women to one of women, a female-centered fiction, transforming ‘old structures into new songs of beauty and praise as well as rebellion and change’ (p. 178).

With its broad and detailed attention to the Italian American literary community, America Trattabili succeeds in its goal of looking at how a community reveals itself to itself and to others by understanding their work ‘from the inside looking out rather than from the inside looking in’ (p. 15).