The End: A Novel

After reading the blurb I expected to dislike this book but quite the opposite. It is extremely well written, almost lyrical in places, and kept me entertained through out. I strongly recommend this book to any reader.

"The End" is an interesting book, very much worth reading. It also requires a patient reader. It is the story of one day, Assumption Day, August 15, 1953, in Elephant Park, a section of Cleveland settled by Italian immigrants. However, the narrative structure is not chronological; it moves backward and forward in time and ends with a chapter entitled "The Present Moment: 1915." The lives of characters overlap, often in ways that at first are not entirely clear. The inside flap of the cover even offers an explanation of the novel's structure by appending a passage from the novel itself: "Distant events have thrown us into long, comet-like orbits, far from our origins, bur eventually we will circle back on people whose lives preceded and gave rise to our own." The first 65 pages belong to the baker, Rocco LaGrassa, but he then disappears from the story for a long time. Two chapters are devoted to a mystery involving a jeweler. The elderly woman at the center of the book, Costanza Marini, is the most complex character, but even she cannot be fully understood until the novel's end. Scibona's depiction of an immigrant community in flux, under pressures arising from racial conflict, changing social and cultural mores, and differences between first and second generation perspectives is lyrical, poetical. As a reader, you feel that you have been transported to times and places now lost. However, "The End" is not a book to pick up and put down too many times; if your reading is interrupted by the usual interference (work, weariness, lack of time) you may find yourself repeatedly going back a few pages to pick up the narrative thread. The effect of reading "The End" is a bit like listening to music; when you remove your bookmark and begin to read, you may have to wait a little (as you read) before you can hear the melody line again.

In a debut novel, Scibona takes us on a tour of Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant community in Ohio. "The End" follows several members of the community, each carefully crafted and realistically written. Set in the 1950s, it deals with both the immigrant experience in Elephant Park, and around the country, as the characters leave the Park moving their lives forward. The characters are varied; Costanza, an elderly abortionist, her young seamstress apprentice, Lina, Rocco, a baker faced with the death of his son in a Korean POW camp. Moving backward and forward in time, the book builds to a crescendo of an ending at Elephant Park's street carnival. Scibona has had short fiction published in a number of literary journals (Best New American Voices 2004, "The Pushcart Book of Short Stories") and his jump to long fiction took him straight to a National Book Award nomination. His use of language is subtle, seductive and sometimes deserves rereading a passage out loud.

My God, the sentences of Signore Scibona! Constructions hard-headed yet lovely, precise yet inventive: "Night, for children, was more a place than a time." And: "...Lina was a child. She lacked the natural cruelty that a conversance with the marital act encouraged one to refine." And: "The city was a mammoth trash heap -- even the lake was brown -- but it was an honorable place. It put pretty to one side." THE END is a debut novel -- a runner-up for the current Nat'l Book Award -- and it has a lot more where that came from. Another GR guy could pluck a handful of different yet equally delicious turns of phrase. All combine skewed aphorism, urbanity with all the senses open, Roman Catholic arcana and Southern Italian superstition, and plain old perspicuity about the human animal as it ages and changes. Physical description, too, proves on the money and felicitous. As for plot, hmm, the novel's central date falls in August, 1953, a moment when "Europe was happening, right here, and it didn't fit." Didn't fit any longer, that is: on this day in Scibona's Italian-American Cleveland begins the decay that hit all inner cities during that era, largely because the "moolies"-- the African Americans -- start moving in. Scibona's opening chapters hinge on an incident in which the a miracle-seeking Ital-Am throng, out for a parade behind a statue of the Madonna, threatens to erupt in a race riot. A few dancing blacks disrupt the celebration. That disruption, as the novel goes on, passes through the prism of four or five different vantage points. The result is a metropolitan oratorio, with an bristling combination of wit and pathos, alive throughout with a brio delivered out of the side of the mouth. THE END has the earmarks of a masterpiece we'll be reading long after our own neighborhoods shuffle off this grease-stained coil.

Scibona's first book made me realize what a lazy reader I've become. I began this one in my usual fashion, fully intending to skim it, skipping the dull details and anticipated awkward prose, just to see what this new author had to offer. Somewhere in his first paragraph, I found myself emitting a loud, mental "WHOA!" and slowed down to savor the prose (even re-reading some passages!), the unique characters, the dark and too-accurate humor. "The cowl makes the monk," Scibona writes. "Radiant debut," indeed.