The Long Italian Goodbye

Book excerpt: The Italian neighborhood surrounding Oakley Avenue on Chicago's West Side in 1948 is a Tuscan village transplanted from northern Italy thirty years before. Joey is ten, an only child born of the Great Depression, weaned on the lustrous myths of the neighborhood's gangster past, and reveling in the cooking of his Tuscan grandmothers. This is, for Joey, that special year when boyhood ends, a year of extremes of joy and grief. He earns money by delivering coffee to the black workers in the neighborhood factory, and becomes aware for the first time of the place of black people in his world. During the traditional summer retreat of the neighborhood's mothers and children to a rural Michigan lakefront town, he experiences the first stirrings of romantic love, but also the numbing pain of the death of his best friend. He comes to doubt the very existence of God, and learns that life is not what he had imagined, that even the joy of a kiss will be forever tinged with mortality. He returns to the city a changed person, his faith shaken but his conscience awakened, and he takes his first small stand against injustice. As the year ends, his family moves away from the old neighborhood and Joey leaves behind its sights, sounds, smells, and people, especially his first love Benita, and a big piece of himself.--Dust jacket.