Lentricchia’s “The Sadness of Antonioni” –A Segue Novel from High-Brow “Italian Actress” to Pop-Gangster “Eliot Conte Mysteries”
Lentricchia’s “The Sadness of Antonioni” –A Segue Novel from High-Brow “Italian Actress” to Pop-Gangster “Eliot Conte Mysteries”
(May 1, 2014)
Just as Lentricchia’s recently published “The Dog Killer of Utica” is the second in the Eliot Conte pop-crime series following “Accidental Pallbearer”, critical reading of “The Sadness of Antonioni” strongly suggests that it may have originally been intended as a Jack Del Piero sequel to the high-brow “The Italian Actress”. “The Italian Actress” was only 122 pages long. Clearly, at the end, protagonist Del Piero was a character in transition, whom Lentricchhia then picked up in the very beginning of “The Sadness of Antonioni”. /// /// However, I would speculate, while writing “The Sadness of Antonioni”, the author’s high-brow muse, cultivated over decades of reading and writing about the most high-brow literature in Western culture, gave way. Lentricchia lost the Del Piero plot line – transcending to a low-brow melodramatic ‘boy meets girl’ – boy loses girl’ – ‘boy finds girl’ plot, and mafia intrigue. “The Sadness of Antonioni” in turn paves the way (segues) to the Eliot Conte melodramatic pop-crime series. /// /// This not to say or imply Lentricchia had completely broken with his high-brow past in “The Sadness of Antonioni”. On the contrary, that is why it may be characterized as a ‘segue novel’. There still are high-brow aspects such as the four chapter ‘Alice In Wonderland-esque’ Red Queen Mad Hatter discourse in University of Chicago PhD Hank Morelli’s seminar: “The Crisis of Temporality in the Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni” – (anyone who has enrolled in a humanities seminar and ran out of the room screaming might want to skip these chapters least they trigger a post traumatic stress episode). /// /// Another segue characteristic: “The Italian Actress” is completely devoid of southern-Italian Americanita, whereas “The Sadness of Antonioni” oozes with references to southern-Italian American cultural as does the Eliot Conte series. Clearly, “The Sadness of Antonioni” is a transitional book segueing from the high-brow northern Italy “The Italian Actress” to the very southern-Italian American pop-crime “Accidental Pallbearer” and “The Dog Killer of Utica.”
Principle Characters
Hank Morelli
“… freshly minted Ph.D out of the University of Chicago – twenty-six years old, with a prize-winning dissertation on “The Crisis of Temporality in the Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni.” He just arrived, “one week before the fall semester, at the College of Western Connecticut, to assume a post in the Program for Theoretical Meditation on Film and Video.”
Jack Del Piero:
“… sixty-two year old chairman of the “Theoretical Meditation Program”, who at age twenty “left college and proceeded to break through with four films in four years. Then, at twenty-five, he begins the journey to oblivion… When he is twenty-eight the renowned film scholar and department head Fred Ozaki secures him a tenured position at Western Conncticut.”
Hank and Jack … Italian Americans
Hank Morelli narrates:
“[The Provost] tells us that we're his Italian-American trump cards in the great American diversity show.
“We were his ‘Negro equivalents, so why should I hire any more of those people?’
“Jack and I thought of ourselves as ex-Italian-Americans who'd broken out of prison, though neither of us, truth be told, had ever done a minute of ethnic hard time.
Jack is not a great talker and I have difficulty speaking grammatically and fear that my working oral vocabulary rises to the level of a not unusually bright eighth-grader. Strip Jack and me of our official identities and you'll take us for stereotypical Italian-American dummies – Yo! Tony! – graduates, at best, of two-year technical institutes.
Cliff (Angelo) Rintrona
"Owner of Rintrona's Bakery and Café - with an unprepossessing display case: bread, many varieties of cookies, cannoli, and his specialty, voluptuous Sicilian cassata. Cliff's pastries are highly regraded.
“Cliff is advanced in age, but not in appearance. He stood ramrod straight. Had all of his hair, silver and crew cut, the forearms of a major-league home run hitter and—despite those long hours in the bakery—sported a ruddy outdoors complexion. Nevertheless.
“Cliff is advanced in age, but not in appearance. He stood ramrod straight. Had all of his hair, silver and crew cut, the forearms of a major-league home run hitter and—despite those long hours in the bakery—sported a ruddy outdoors complexion. Nevertheless.
It occurred to me that a good title for the present article might be:
The Sadness of …“The Sadness of Antonioni”.
Sad from the southern-Italian American point of view.
It is sad that Lentricchia developed such interesting and divers Italian American characters with such great depth of personality – and yet left them withering in a deus ex machina driven melodramatic plot, unable to meld them into a literary work that celebrated the intellectual, aesthetic and moral complexity of southern-Italian Americana that has come down through 3,000 years of history. Although, the stereotypical violent potential lurks just below the surface of these men: “You Italians are good a scaring people, she said”
Instead, the ‘Amerda-con’ girl Jenny is the embodiment of heroic virtue, character and intelligence. This is reminiscent of Don De Lillo’s “Underworld”; wherein the magnificent Bronx Little Italy character Bronzini” is psychological destroyed, while his cuckolding Jewish wife goes on to celebrated fame.
Jenny Thornberry
Jenny is deceptively introduced as “the cashier and taker of orders at Wendy’s”. However, Lentricchia develops her character to be the center of the plot's action (the protagonist), demonstrating depth of intelligence and heroic courage and putting herself at physical risk in order to find the truth about a mafia murder for the benefit of Hank’s peace of mind. Lentricchia juxtaposes her street smart intellect against Hank, an Ivory Tower intellectual, who lacks knowledge and experience in the world outside of the academia. For example,
Ph.D Hank asks: “In the 1930s, how many Paul Morellis lived in Danbury?” “How can I know that?”
Wendy’s clerk Jenny replies: “Easy. Old city directories in the Danbury Public Library.”
Hank Morelli, quintessential “Glass Bead Game Magister Ludi” (Hesse), who spent years in university libraries researching movies, has never heard about city directories in a public library.
The Plot (…for Lifetime Television)
The main plot is a classic Lifetime Television movie melodrama: boy meets girl - boy loses girl - boy finds girl. Further, the boy-loses-girl component is driven by a mafia revenge subplot.
The Sub-Plot (boy-loses-girl)
In a classic example of a deus ex machina melodramatic ‘get the plot moving’ device; coincidently Cliff, the owner of the café where Hank has breakfast, knew Hank’s grandfather who was murdered in Chicago decades ago. Think about it: Hank just happens to get a teaching job in a town far from Chicago and just happens to start having morning breakfast a Cliff’s café and just happens to become very good friends with Cliff who knew Hank’s murdered grandfather.
The plot thickens …Coincidently
Jenny, a clerk at Wendy’s where Hank eats dinner, and the girl he falls in love with, has a life long fatherly relationship with Cliff.
Think about it … If Hank ate breakfast and dinner at home, there would be no basis for a plot.
Hank begins to think Cliff may have murdered his grandfather and Jenny who loves Cliff and Hank sets out to prove otherwise. She leaves town for a couple of weeks and the smitten Hank goes into mass depression – pass the Kleenex!
Not to worry Lifetime television fans … good triumphs over evil and there is a happy ending.
The Bifurcated Plot
The plot of “The Sadness of Antonioni” is ‘to-my-mind’ bifurcated and never achieves unity; suggesting that the author started one story line and transitioned to another.
A reasonable case can be made, based on internal criticism, that this novel was originally conceived as a sequel to Lentricchia’s ‘sex-sniff’ film novel “The Italian Actress”. From that novel, the protagonist, sex-snuff filmmaker Jack Del Piero, Nadia an actress in the film, and the film itself are brought forth in the beginning of “The Sadness of Antonionni”.
Jack is the head of a film department in College of Western Connecticut Film Department and Nadia is his companion. In “The Italian Actress” Jack destroys the snuff film. However, in “The Sadness of Antonioni” it is reveled that Nadia had saved a copy and they want to do a sequel, which would include Hank Morelli and his girlfriend Jenny.
However, none of this plays any significant role in the main plot (i.e. the vast bulk of narrative). It is just left ‘hanging’, as it where.
At best, dark and morally depraved Jack and Nadia constitute a minor part as literary-foils juxtaposed and contrasted to quintessentially good Hank and Jenny – daytime television at its best. In short, Jack and Nadia and their film contribute virtually nothing to the boy-girl main plot.
I would speculate that Lentricchia started writing “The Sadness of Antonioni” as a continuation of “The Italian Actress”. Significantly, “The Italian Actress” is only a 122 pages long - a smidge more than a short story. At the end, Jack Del Piero is leaving Italy heading back to his teaching position at Western Connecticut. Lentricchia may have had more to write but did not know how to work it into “The Italian Actress”, so he thought about a sequel. However, the sequel took him in a different direction.
Another indicator that “The Sadness of Antonioni” may be thought of as a stillborn sequel to “The Italian Actress,” was the clandestine filming by a private investigator of what turned out to be violent sex motel room encounter. The descriptions of the investigator setting up his equipment brought to mind the detail description of Jack's filming equipment in “The Italian Actress”.
I'm not saying that a sequel was in fact what Lentricchia had in mind - just saying the text of both novels when taken together, the thought comes to mind.
All of which brings us to the greatest mystery of all about this novel –the title “The Sadness of Antonioni”
L’Avventura (forget-about-it)
There are four chapters in the book describing Hank’s seminar “The Crisis of Temporality in the Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni”. More specifically, three of the chapters are devoted to his ‘analysis’ of the Antonioni film L’Avventura.
Frankly, I am at a complete loss to explain what role they play in the plot. Accordingly, the question is: What does Antonioni have to do with the action associated with Jenny, Cliff and Hank’s grandfather’s murder or any other aspect of the main plot narrative.
I hasten to add … I’m not saying the Antonioni film and the seminar scenes are not relevant. I am literature challenged and the chapters filled with seminar discourse are largely meaningless to me. For example, Dr. Morelli:
“(Runs film with sound. Dialogue. Pause. Reverse. Four times.) Did you get it? If you run it eight or nine times, as I have, you will… Rerunning a scene is nothing compared to running a moment frame by frame. Then we see the true film unfold—the film that is hidden, the texture of Antonioni's consciousness cloaked, until we had this ability to bring it into the light…
“Antonioni is easing us into the true film, into the arresting silence of the irreducible image. What he gives us in the opening scene is literature in pictures. Images deliberately constructed to produce sociohistorical readings. And I gave you a literary reading.”
OMG!
Let me out of here. I want a tuition refund! Better to read old city directories in the public library than look for hidden films within films!
But, that’s me! My point is that perhaps the literati can find meaning in these chapters and link them to the main plot or other aspects of the narrative, and indeed the title of the book. But, me? … I don't get it – Yo.
In sum, on balance “The Sadness of Antonioni” is a good and entertaining read.
Southern-Italian Americans will appreciate the many allusions to their cultural heritage.
While, as I have argued at some length, the plot is somewhat melodramatic, that does not imply that it is bad. Melodrama, when done well, is a legitimate literary art form. However, the boy-girl scenario was a tad too daytime television.
Compare the Hank/Jenny interaction with the Jack/Claudia in “The Italian Actress”, and I think the qualitative literary difference will be obvious.
Even the components such as the snuff film and seminar scenes that I don’t see fitting well into the boy-girl main plot can be interesting. Indeed, would that the author had done more with the fascinating Italian women Nadia, who was part of both. Like the characters Hank, Jack and Cliff, she is left hanging while the somewhat clichéd American girl runs with the narrative.
Lentricchia demonstrates in this book and “The Italian Actress” the ability to create depth of characters struggling with the perennial moral and aesthetic issues that define great literature. But, to my mind, he still has not developed the essence of the fiction writer’s craft – plot. However, he is relative new to fiction writing. I am confident that there is a great literary southern-Italian American novel trying to come out of him. Perhaps, the twenty-first century’s “Christ in Concrete.”
The Eliot Conte series “Accidental Pallbearer” and “The Dog Killer of Utica” is moving him in that direction. But, as the saying goes: “Miles to go …”
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