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Books
REVIEWS
Literary
crime story
by Fred Gardaphe
▲ JOSEPH BATHANTI
EXCERPT From the Book
Pittsburgh is self-consciously mythic,
over-determined in its symbolism: all
these bridges and tunnels, the sage and
capricious divagations of the Monongahela
and Allegheny spawning against
banks of steel the juggernaut Ohio. You
don’t think about these things if you’re
born here and you sure as hell don’t use
language like this. Words are risky: another
way to get your ass kicked
though, in East Liberty. Where I grew
up on Saint Marie Street, it was custom,
a sanctified rite, for people to disparage
one another. The parable of the boy
whose face froze with his cruel impersonation
of the octoroon with Bella’s
Palsy, or the paralytic who sat gargoyle-like
on his porch in a wheelchair
because he had dived into the forbidden
river and broken his back in the
shallows, the half-dozen wanderers
with plates in their heads. But there’s
food on your table, and your kids are
healthy. You get down on your knees
and thank God.”
The Life of the World to Come
by Joseph Bathanti
■ PUBLISHER:
The University of South Carolina Press
■ PAGES: 252 (hardcover)
■ COST: $29.95
■ ISBN: 13: 978-1-6117-453-3
■ WEBSITE: www.sc.edu/uscpress
Want more? Visit italianamericanvoice.com.
We all come from one East Liberty or
another. It’s a familiar place that gets
richer as time moves on. It’s that place
that memory forges out of fact and fantasy,
out of what was and what should
have been — the place 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.
East Liberty, Penn.,
a working-class neighborhood
of Pittsburgh,
has been the setting for
much of the fiction and
some of the poetry of
Joseph Bathanti. His
first novel, about to be
reprinted, was in fact
titled “East Liberty.” In
his latest novel, “The
Life of the World to
Come,” Bathanti returns
to his birthplace to set in motion all
the things that can turn a good boy bad.
George Dolce, a kid born to workingclass
parents — both children of Italian
immigrants — is a smart, hardworking
college kid who gambles just enough to
help his family out. For the most part, his
bets are smart, safe and designed to get
him through college and into an Ivy
League law school. When he takes a job
at the local pharmacy, run by Mr.
Rosechild, a Jewish man who has money
to burn and a loyalty to his home team,
the Pittsburgh Steelers, George turns to a
bookie, taking the pharmacist for the
money he needs to keep his family in
their home when his father loses his job.
The worst happens after George falls
in love with Rosechild’s daughter, and
the pharmacist’s betting gets out of hand.
George gets in trouble with his bookie,
which means he also must deal with the
local gangster who runs things in the
hood. The result is a tragic story of a
young man’s fall from grace and his futile
flight toward freedom.
Throughout the novel, George narrates
what happens as well as what could
happen. The result is a
narrative tension that
keeps the reader wondering
how it’s all going to
end. Bathanti, a poet as
well as a natural-born storyteller,
casts a literary
crime story that becomes
part thriller, part comingof-age
account of something
that could happen to
any smart kid who tries
too hard to fight what he
perceives as the fate of following
in his father’s
hopeless footsteps.
East Liberty is a place
where even the best of the
local kids end up on its
skid row streets. We see it
all first, as George gives his middle-class
girlfriend a tour of the neighborhood in
her father’s Cadillac, and later, as he
morphs into Michael Roman and walks
Crow, his new girlfriend, through East
Liberty’s tough streets in search of a way
to right all the bad he has done. While it’s
too late to change the past, George hopes
it’s not too late to save his soul.
Somewhere between George’s fantasies
and the narrator’s reality lies the
magic that makes this novel a must read.
This tale of two Georges, crafted by a
master of the literary trade, reminds us
that literature can still do more than any
film to reveal the extremes humanity can
handle when facing the obstacles that
stand in the way of achieving our dreams.
56 September 2015 FRA NOI for ComUNICO