East Liberty

Joseph Bathanti

Description

A fatherless boy is conflicted by his Catholic upbringing and his dreams in this coming-of-age novel

East Liberty is a poetic, passionate coming-of-age novel spanning 1955 to 1963, set in an Italian-American neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Roberto (Bobby) Renzo, the novel's fatherless narrator and main character, lives with Francene Renzo, his beautiful, mysterious, and unconventional mother who gave birth to him out of wedlock. Together the two habitually watch vintage Hollywood movies on TV. Orbiting Bobby and Francene are the Catholic Church; Francene's gothic, judgmental, Neapolitan parents; and the dramatically shifting culture at large hurtling toward them.

While urged by the nuns at his school to pursue the priesthood — though his dream is to be a big-league baseball player — Bobby is drawn toward the temptations of the secular world, and finds himself involved in petty crimes and seduced by his awakening sexuality. As he emerges from his childhood cloud of innocence, his desire to know about his father becomes acute, and he is forced to confront the confusion and contradictions that rule his life.

First published in hardcover in 2001, East Liberty won the Carolina Novel Award and was named a finalist for Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Award in Literary Fiction. This paperback edition features a new foreword by Fred Gardaphé, a distinguished professor of English and Italian American Studies at Queens College/CUNY and the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute.

Sujets

• Historical
• Coming of Age
• Chucrut
• Mr.
• Isaly's
• Velveeta
• Mrs.
• Sauerkraut
• Nativity scene
• Rin Tin Tin
• General officer
• Marlene Dietrich
• Enema
• Historical fiction
• Parchment
• Kennywood
• General
• Gunga Din
• Jimmy Durante
• Rintintin
• Anisette
• Oliver Hardy
• Vivien Leigh
• MR
• Peter Lorre
• Greta Garbo
• Pancho Villa
• Fiction
• Boris Karloff

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611176438
• Langue: English

Extrait

East Liberty
A Novel
East Liberty
Joseph Bathanti
With a New Foreword by Fred Gardaphe

The University of South Carolina Press
2016 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bathanti, Joseph.
East liberty : a novel / Joseph Bathanti ; with a new foreword by Fred Gardaphe.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-61117-642-1 (softcover : acid-free paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-643-8 (ebook) 1. Teenage boys-Fiction. 2. Mothers and sons-Fiction. 3. East Liberty (Pittsburgh, Pa.)-Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.A89E185 2016
813 .6-dc23
2015022534
Front cover design by Faceout Studio, Emily Weigel
Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Foreword
We all come from one East Liberty or another. It s a familiar place that gets richer as time moves on, a place that memory fashions out of fact and fantasy, out of what was and what should have been, where imagination takes what once was real and weaves it into something that s useful. The pieces of our personal history that come from such places become the building blocks of personality, and for the fiction writer, that past becomes a playground out of which stories, often better than the histories, are spun.
Joseph Bathanti s East Liberty lies in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an area of the city that housed Italians and blacks during the 1960s-when the Pittsburgh Pirates were baseball s world champs, when everyone is singing the songs from the film West Side Story , when nuns are the queens of corporal punishment and single-parent families are rare. The narrator, Roberto Renzo, describes himself as a boy who has always said he will marry his mother. He lives with the fear that his mother, whom he refers to-at her insistence-as Francene, will never return whenever she leaves him, sometimes with her parents, Italian immigrants from Naples, sometimes with friends he calls uncle and aunt.
Mothers have never fared well in an American literature crowded by male writers who turn into or against their traditional macho fathers as they find their ways from boys to men. It seems that the only writers who have acknowledged the power their mothers have had in shaping their manhood are Italian Americans such as Mario Puzo, who in his The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), set the groundwork for his accepted American classic The Godfather (1969) by turning Lucia Santa, the mother figure of his earlier novel, into Don Vito Corleone; Robert Ferro, with his The Family of Max Desir (1984) sets the mother figure as the center of all the novel s relationships.
Robert Viscusi in his American Book Award-winning novel Astoria (1995) uncovered the center of the Italian American mother-son relationship that makes a man want to protect his mother from all harm and believe that he can even protect her from death-and if he doesn t, he s a failure. Viscusi revealed a dynamic central to understanding a weakness inherent in the mother-son relationship. That weakness is the unacknowledged pact between mother and son in which a mother acquires the son s protection by bartering her ability to deflect and absorb many of the feelings that assault the young boy. In exchange for this care, the mother expects nothing less than total loyalty from her son. Bathanti s mother/son story marks the evolution of this new sense of masculinity that challenges those crafted by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Norman Mailer. Bathanti has created a prototype for the powerful woman, who is determined to live her own life and raise her son in her own, unique way.
Bobby s father is a vague memory that reappears in times when a hero is needed. Sometimes the young boy is confused about the men in his mother s life, and wonders if some of them are, in fact, his father. Without a father, Bobby turns to his grandparents for help in understanding the world he is entering; the trouble is that his grandparents are both stuck in their Old World ways, and do more to frighten than to enlighten the young boy. Nonna, her head wrapped in a black kerchief, speaks no English and warns him not to go near her steamer trunk filled with the bones of her ancestors who will drag him in. Through breath of chewed garlic and parsley, she teaches him about Spacaluccio, a monster that grabs kids who wander too far from home. Grandpa, who reeks of DiNobili cigars and homemade wine, feeds him pig s ears and eyes, and expects him to drink wine with his meals. Francene filters the grandparents Old World ways by telling Bobby that Spacaluccio is a make believe, a legend that takes on the identity of the latest immigrant tragedy: a construction worker buried in concrete, or a cuckolded soldier. Francene declares Spacaluccio just a story made up by crazy Italians to scare their children. They are in love with misery. It is their genius, and out of it they conjure a monster. They really are the monsters. East Liberty is a monster. Its enemy is happiness; it eats children. Bobby witnesses the struggle between Francene and her parents for control over her life as a single mother and her desire to live as an independent woman. Through all this, Bobby learns to defy the authorities that try to control his life, and to create his own world.
Those authorities are found in the ordered, ritualistic world of the Catholic Church that s got Bobby thinking he might become a priest, and Nardini s tavern, where the father of his best friend tends bar, and where the boys hang out and learn to shoot a mean game of pool. Bobby s vocation of priesthood is diverted by his love for baseball where he finds father-figure heroes like Bill Mazeroski and Mickey Mantle. Bobby and Francene may live inside these worlds, but they reach beyond them through the magic of Hollywood. The classic films they watch together on television feed the young boy s imagination and give him a basis by which to compare his reality. To Bobby, they are good stories, and serve as morality tales, like the Old Testament and Jesus parables. But these romances are crashing contrasts to life on the streets of East Liberty, a black and Italian neighborhood in Pittsburgh where if school nuns don t get you then the street gangs will. Street parables come in the form of misfits like Mooch and Montmorrissey Hilliard, or any of the neighborhood freaks that parents point out to their children as warnings of what happens to kids who break the rules. Bobby s accounts of his interactions with these people are filled with the awe of first impressions that form into wisdom through later reflections.
The Hollow, a place on the neighborhood s fringe filled with abandoned junk, including a life-size statue of Saint Anthony, is inhabited by the monster Spaccalucio, and frequented by the local gangs who take their names from the Broadway play West Side Story; it becomes the proving ground for Bobby s ability to defend himself from the forces of evil. The bridges between these worlds are formed by popular culture through classic films, television programs, sports and music. It is through these venues that Bobby learns to deal with the ups and downs of life and how to form escapes into worlds he creates through his imagination. As his best friend Mickey says, It s all about art. And in Bobby s world, art always trumps reality. Art is the creation of life, of the way life could be, should be, can t be, but is. Bathanti s literary art is couched in this tension between Hollywood classics in black and white, and the multi-colored street-life of East Liberty; the novel s action is episodic and not the result of any plot, making it different from the usual coming-of-age stories.
Bathanti creates scenes like paintings. His noir style is a unique synthesis of impressionism and realism that distorts reality and realizes the kaleidoscopic nature of memory as it reconstructs a past that the present needs. Here is tight, concise writing that you want to read slowly so you can gaze at the images and let the sounds sink in.
At times East Liberty is reminiscent of other great works by Italian American writers, like Gilbert Sorrentino s Aberration of Starlight , John Fante s 1933 Was a Bad Year , and Tony Ardizzone s Heart of the Order . You can really see this in Roberto s passion for baseball. She [Francene] feels I substitute baseball for religion-for God-and attributes my obsession to the fact that I do not have a father. But she is wrong. Baseball and God are the same to me. But his mother has no problem letting him into her escape from the troubles of their life; and together they form a nuclear family that defies tradition and has the neighbors talking.
The novel ends in a home movie of Bobby s Confirmation reprising the characters that made up his childhood, all lifting a toast to his health. But is this an eight-millimeter documentary of the event, or something Bobby has only imagined? The beauty of this work is that it tells a familiar story in an unfamiliar way and through it all we get a better sense of the impact childhood has on our lives.
The mark of a good writer is not what he publishes, but what remains in print and what is republished. And this new edition of the 2001 Carolina Award winning novel recognizes the value of Joseph Bathanti s best efforts to tell stories that matter. Bathanti is one writer who can be depended upon to consistently produce high-quality fiction, poetry and essays. He is a master language crafter and consistently produces narratives that are deceptively simple in style and dynamically rich in textual complexity. No matter what genre he is working in, this writer has a way of latching onto a character or an idea and not letting go until he gets you to care