The Saint of Lost Things (2005) by Christopher Castellani

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Saint of Lost Things (2005) 

by Christopher Castellani 

Wilmington, Delaware

Delaware: 2/3

   The Saint of Lost Things is volume 2 of a four or five volume saga about an Italian American family living in Wilmington, Delaware.  Author Christopher Castellani is the director of Grub Street, the arts organization that was embroiled in the 'bad art friend' scandal last year.   Like many of the authors on this list he has a decent reputation and a job teaching the arts but no real hits.  I mention it because while I was reading The Saint of Lost Things it occurred to me that the author was trying to give Italian Americans the kind of serious family/immigrant novel that they lack.  It was a supposition that was born out by the New York Times review of the next volume in this series, where the reviewer quotes Castellani as being motivated by the degree to which Italian-Americans have been ignored by the more intellectual parts of American literary culture.

 Welp. Not to make things worse, but my main thought while reading The Saint of Lost Things was precisely how uninteresting this particular group of characters turned out in the pages of this book.  The main character is the Italian immigrant/matriarch of the clan, here she is a young bride, recently arrived from Italy, who is struggling to fulfill her function as a bearer of healthy children (preferably a son) and make her way in the confusing world of America.  Her husband works at a Ford Factory and dreams of opening his own restaurant.   There's also the brother of the husband and his non-Italian wife and a single man (also Italian American) who lives by himself after the death of his parents.  Besides the ongoing obsession with this lady having a child, the rest of the plot largely revolves around attempts by the locals to scare the sole African American family into moving out of their Italian American neighborhood.   They all come across as a bunch of uneducated assholes.  Not sure if that was the point, but that was the message I received.

  Reading The Saint of Lost Things did give me cause to consider the "dim bulb" narrator problem and how it might apply to Italian-Americans, a group that largely eschew intellectual accomplishments in favor of "hard work," however that may be defined.   Probably a legacy of millennium of being under the boot of Catholicism and being told to keep their mouths shut and to not ask any questions of authority, I'd guess.