The Brooklyn Rail

Tony Ardizzone is the kind of novelist who, like, say, Margaret Atwood, E. L. Doctorow, John Edgar Wideman, or, for that matter, Italo Calvino, is essentially unable to write a bad book. The reason is simple enough. He is a masterful storyteller. In this regard, his special talent is not his writing style or technique. His prose is not especially innovative. Neither is the structure of his sentences nor his dialogues. You won’t find his books in any collection of postmodern fiction, thank God. This, of course, does not mean that he is a poor technician. Quite the contrary—the linearity of the sentences, the simplicity of the structures and the dialogues, is what makes his prose elegant, precise, and powerful at once. There is not one single word that is out of place on any page in his books. Likewise, simplicity does not equal a Hemingwayesque paucity of words. Rather, of the two lines that to a large extent still define modern American fiction, the Hemingway line (think of Raymond Carver) and the Faulkner line (think, obviously, of Toni Morrison), Ardizzone falls in the latter. He does so, however, not because of the Black oratory that infuses the resonating voice of Mr. Faulkner’s best characters, Black and white alike in case you wonder, or the long, elliptical paragraphs and the interplay of language and time. For the most part, time is chronology (however nonlinear) and history in Ardizzone’s fiction, even when it is in the guise of memory; whereas the orality of some of his writing, such as that of his 1999 masterpiece titled In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, incidentally one of the greatest novels of the ethnic experience in America written after WWII, is steeped in the Mediterranean voices and stories of his Italian ancestors. Rather, the Faulknerian quality of Ardizzone’s novels is the number of different words that he can insert on one page.

It is this skill that, combined with the above-mentioned qualities of his prose, propels the mythopoetic force of his storytelling, and makes it potent. Add to it a fiction whose landscape is, almost invariably, some sort of working-class environment, whether in the Moroccan streets and cities of The Arab’s Ox: Stories of Morocco, the author’s native North Side of Chicago in Heart of the Order and many of his accomplished short stories, or the British Columbian fishing town of The Whale Chaser, the novel with which he took the Italian American experience out of the immigrant phase and into the turbulent history and memories of WWII internment camps and the Vietnam War. Likewise, working-class are his characters and the Catholicism with which they invariably struggle. Indeed, for Ardizzone Catholicism and the working-class are essentially synonyms, not in a sociological sense, let alone in a mere economic or theological one, but in the sense that they define the inner life of his characters and the places they inhabit, from the memorable Tonto Schwartz of In the Name of the Father (talk about Catholicism!) to the rebellious Vinnie Sansone of the previously mentioned The Whale Chaser.

Dubravka, the Croatian woman who stands at the center of his sixth novel, In Bruno’s Shadow, is no exception. As far as I am concerned, she is the most powerful female character an American fiction writer of Italian descent has created since Michael DeCapite’s Maria, in that extraordinary (and extraordinarily forgotten) novel that is his 1943 debut Maria. Just like Maria, Dubravka is a young woman that from the margins, both geographically and in terms of subject position, traverses the different places where her life takes her to become the center of the novel that affirms faith and love in the human condition in spite of, or perhaps because of, the obstacles, the setbacks, the abuses, even the tragedies that she and the other various characters encounter. Her trajectory takes her from her native Croatian village, where she lives with an alcoholic father and that she leaves for a convent as “an expression of female autonomy” after finding out the comforting truth about why her mother left the family, to (not by accident) Rome, the center of Christianity, where she works in a modest “pensione” and does volunteer work after the tsunami that devastated Thailand in 2004 (speaking of tragedies). All roads lead to Rome, as we all know, and no other novel reflects the old proverb more than In Bruno’s Shadow. Dubravka’s road to Rome, in the end, is the mirror of her character development, the fact that “she felt a strong kinship” with the old Dominican friar that questioned the anti-modern stance of the Catholic Church, just like Dubravka questions the patriarchal nature of her modernity. Like Bruno, “she also has had her own ideas and beliefs,” including the belief that, in typical Mediterranean fashion, aside from Jesus of Nazareth, Maria is the closest “any human being ever came to being God.”

One could read this crucial line in the novel, perhaps the novel’s defining line, as an unconscious move to disempower Dubravka, by way of Maria, as a woman. A way, that is, of reifying the latter as a mystical, transcendental entity, and thus de-bodying her. In other words, one could read this line as a re-insertion of patriarchy, given that Christianity and indeed all three monotheistic religions think of God as man/father. But, given that, as far as I know, nobody can actually be God but God himself (there it comes the male gendering), what if, as I think this is actually the case, the point of this line is to underline the basic material, bodily reality that Maria, and, conversely, Dubravka, is, first and foremost, a human being. That is to say, a woman is a human being too and, as such, she is entitled to claim her right to have “her own ideas and beliefs.” If that is indeed the case, then all the suffering, the tragedies, the obstacles, and the abuses become at once an indictment of patriarchy, beginning with the patriarchy of the Catholic Church that by so doing turns religion into a hierarchical discourse and a structure of power, as well as a way to connect the different characters in the novel.

All of them, in fact, must deal with disappointments and tragedies. Whether it is Allison, a former alcoholic who ended up waiting tables in Japan; or Lucy, the Canadian woman, though South Korean by birth, who was adopted by a Catholic orphanage; or Valentino, the “dark, swarthy” closeted gay and Roman native, or Erika, the disillusioned university professor. Let alone Sam, the “swarthy, thick … with a full head of dark hair” Italian American father from San Francisco who goes to Rome to visit the places his young daughter visited in the Eternal City before dying—trying, in vain, to make sense of her death.

In one way or another, Dubravka becomes the character that connects all these people’s stories, whether directly by entering their life, however briefly, or indirectly, by steering the narrative towards them. Nonetheless, Ardizzone avoids making her a narrative machine, a force of (re)production. It is no coincidence, I think, that she is no mother. She is, once again, a woman, one who, while on a bus, sends a man that wants to touch her back to his seat, where he belongs, and who knows that “every woman experiences what it’s like to be looked at,” what is like to be objectified as something that one is not. One who questions whether “every action a woman commits in her life need to be seen in the context of man.” Likewise, women are the figures represented in the countless paintings of the countless churches that Ardizzone takes his characters and the reader into, the way a professional Rome tour guide can only dream of. Starting with, tellingly, the church of Santa Maria Maddalena, where Lucy notices that “every image … was female,” whereas another female character, Iris Mackenzie, note the Scottish, hence Protestant last name, comments, “I can’t imagine a church named after Mary Magdalene … After all, and please forgive my language, but wasn’t she a whore?” So what, I am tempted to reply. But after all, Puritans will be Puritans. Except that, another visitor, Brian Kent, speaking for Ardizzone (or is it the other way around?), explains to her and the reader that Magdalene was neither a prostitute nor an adulteress. She was, instead, the only person who witnessed “Christ’s death, the discovery of his resurrection, and his later ascension” and that there’s “no evidence that she was sinful,” before pointing out how indeed she was called “‘the Apostle to the Apostles’” by none other than the northern African father of the Church known as Saint Augustine; that she wrote a gospel, and she is the most important woman in the Bible after Mary. Which is probably why, surprise surprise, “the early Church suppressed her writings, editing the female principle nearly completely out of the New Testament.”

Almost invariably, the marvelous, detailed map that Ardizzone creates through his characters’ visits to churches, is a way to decenter patriarchy and replace it with marginal figures, to make the margin the centers, and subverting the patriarchal discourse to achieve a different kind of beauty, often through the detailed description of these churches’ frescos. Magdalene is no prostitute or adulteress. Rather, she’s even an original intellectual founder of Christianity. Another female character in a painting is an old lady to whom “the Three Wise Men asked to join them,” as Ben explains to his girlfriend Elena on the way to the next church to visit, “She said no, she was too busy” (talk about female independence). In the San Luigi dei Francesi church Elena is in awe not of a Christ-centered painting, but of The Assumption of the Virgin, the Francesco Bassano fresco that Mary dominates, as she is centrally at the top of the painting and surrounded by so many children that makes one question the idea of her virginity to begin with. Another painting we are introduced to is the Madonna of Loreto, this one indeed a prostitute, as Caravaggio, Ardizzone here in the role of the art historian reminds us, “deliberately chose a well-known Roman prostitute to pose as the Virgin standing with the Christ Child in a doorway.” Additionally, the prostitute-Virgin is barefoot, like an ordinary person, or, better yet, an ordinary woman.

And ordinary, albeit in different ways, are the characters that live and represent ordinarily chaotic lives, which on the one hand provide Ardizzone’s the material to develop them and connect them with one another, on the other to insert as much art and art history in their life and in the reader’s, for he believes, as, for the record, I also do, that:

...true art imposes a sense of order upon what would otherwise be chaos. The artistic act releases energy that flies out into the universe’s vast swirling stew and works against the natural forces of entropy. How that energy is judged or measured or even perceived by other is secondary.

If this passage sounds to you like a moment in The Education of Henry Adams, you are correct. But unlike the old Bostonian Brahmin, Ardizzone has no fear of any dynamo replacing God. Neither does Dubravka because her faith resides neither in a dogmatic theological discourse nor because she feels displaced by a series of epochal changes as Adams did at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. She is, after all, a child of the late twentieth century and, famously, history repeats itself only as farce if it does at all (it does not, anyway). Accordingly, she chastises Pope John Paul II when, in an exchange with Allison about HIV among Africans in the 1990s, she turns the Pope’s dogmatic patriarchal faith on its head, accusing him of having no “compassion,” which he could have easily discovered had he “put himself for one moment in their [the Africans] place,” had he, that is, practiced the forgiving and loving relationality that his only superior showed in the guise of his son.

What the Pope cannot do, Dubravka does, as putting herself for one moment in somebody else's place, or shoes, is precisely what she is capable of doing because it is the foundation of her faith. For the same reason, she invites others to do just the same, whether this is through some volunteer work for an epochal tragedy as the previously mentioned tsunami or, equally important, small gestures such as the exchange of clothes that she has with Allison midway through the novel, my favorite part of the book. There, Allison, who after meeting, talking to, and observing Dubravka decided to book a “one way ticket to Soekarno-Hatta” to join “the other tsunami volunteer workers,” goes in search of Dubravka again at the Fountain of the Four Rivers where the Croatian woman is collecting money for the tsunami relief. Allison, who says she is now “someone else” after meeting Dubravka, offers the latter her “Pierotucci jacket” despite shivering because of the cold weather, “I would love it if you kept this for yourself,” she tells Dubravka. The latter, noticing that the newfound friend is freezing, not only hands Allison her coat. She also drapes “her azure scarf around Allison’s shoulders and head.” Giving is receiving, in truly Mediterranean Catholic fashion, which in turns is the foundation of female friendship and a newfound identity for Allison, as well as the founding rock of Dubravka’s faith.

The concrete materiality of this belief becomes even clearer and gains further strength when it is compared with the scene of the candlelight vigil in Saint Peter’s Square for the dying John Paull II, which Dubravka attends with the last character Ardizzone offers his readers, Blake, a Chicago Irish catholic, a former football lineman as well as a former Christian Brother and teacher at the Brothers’ Chicago school, who is also in Rome, where he resides at the “pensione” where Dubravka works and lives, trying to understand himself and the meaning of his complicated life. The two are at the vigil of the dying Pope in Saint Peter’s Square. After the death of the Pope is announced, Dubravka starts tearing. Blake asked her if she’s crying for him, to which she responds not by denying it, but by explaining a different truth, hers, “My tears aren’t for him … I cried for all those who died in part because they followed his teachings. The hundreds of thousands in Africa, as well as those elsewhere … for all the souls gathered here, for their marvelous expression of faith … Can’t you feel it? The presence of grace?” There is nothing theological here, especially if one considers that the story is wrapped up within Blake’s episode that is dictated by words of the Stations of the Cross and finishes with the good news that his stepmother delivers to him that his “unmarried and pregnant” stepsister, Ginny, “had safely, miraculously, delivered” a baby girl that she had a significant chance to lose and who even posed a risk to her life. Neither is Dubravka so naïve to believe that anything will change in the Catholic Church. Morto un papa se ne fa un altro the old Italian saying goes. Rather, Dubravka finds a reason to believe, within herself and her fellow human beings despite the spectacle that the Church makes of the dying pope.

I must confess that I initially struggled to make sense of the Blake character, who essentially closes the book. He is a Christ figure. As such, I thought it was out of place, at least in the closing section of a novel that revolves around a central powerful female character. Even more so because of the metaphor of the Stations of the Cross that structures his story. Yet, I finally realized that he is not the one delivering either the good news or making a miracle, or telling the truth. His stepmother, note the relationality in place of biology, is the one announcing the miracle of a new life, for unto him a child was born we might paraphrase. Whereas Dubravka tells him the truth, “Understand that when I examine my conscience I find I’ve made a vital distinction, one that allows me all these years to live,” in spite of the abuses and the tragedies one must recall:

I’ve separated my religious beliefs and Catholic faith from the institution of the Church and the rule of the papacy. I feel this even more now that I’m living here in Italy … My faith lies in Christ’s all-loving Mother, the Blessed Virgin, and the doctrine of the Trinity, and not in the words spoken by whatever old, imperfect man who happens to be sitting that day on Peter’s throne.

And what can I, lapsed Mediterranean Catholic that I am, do reading these words, if not close this beautifully written, powerful, and moving novel and weep inside.