Word: principato
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...effective anti-Catholics have been writers who were raised in the Catholic Church and left it, sometimes paroxysms of guilt. James Joyce's splendidly horrific descriptions of a Catholic boyhood in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lent a certain romance to apostasy. In his novels Principato and Farragan 's Retreat, Tom McHale displayed a minor genius for the atmospherics of oppressive ethnic Catholicism. Among certain intellectuals, it is faintly disreputable to be a believing, practicing Catholic; a Catholic becomes spiritually interesting only in his repudiation of the faith...
...writing that can survive such pas sages deserves attention. Those who keep hoping that McHale.will return to the exuberant comedy and middle-class Catholic characters of his first two novels, Principato and Farragan's Retreat, will again be disappointed. McHale seems stubbornly determined not to repeat ear lier successes. In that respect, at least, The Lady from Boston succeeds. The novel will vex those who expect their reading matter to carry the freight of coherent meaning. Those who do not mind the voyeuristic experience of being interested but not concerned will find it a lot easier to take McHale...
Perhaps every good young writer should be allowed a book like this one. Still it is a notable disappointment. Three years ago, McHale published two exhilarating novels in quick succession: Principato and Farragan's Retreat. In both he revealed wild comic gusto, a youthful, vengeful rage at certain vagaries of the Roman Catholic Church, and a visceral knowledge of middle-class Irish and Italians around Philadelphia and the Jersey shore. McHale was never a stylist; he made up in energy what he lacked in elegance...
Farragan is a deeper, more generous creation than Principato, which came out just eight months ago. The author's next book, too, will be about rich, middle-aged man under siege, a subject that McHale researched during several summers as a waiter in the Poconos. He grew up in Scranton, Pa., the eldest of six children, and attended Jesuit schools and Temple University. Now he lives in Vermont, which he calls "the last frontier in the east." He intends to keep up the writing pace as long as he has something to say, and he is fatalistic about...
...offspring of Principato's union with Cynthia have "sallow skins and strange russet-colored hair" and answer to the jig-prompting names of Terrance, Sean. Noreen. Aloysius and Kathleen. To their Italian fathers dismay, they avoid the sun like moles, playing sourly in the shade or roaming dark hallways. Principato blunders through eleven years among this dreadful crew until his father, dying of cancer, announces that he will not mend his 35-year rift with Holy Mother Church and, far more shocking, intends to be cremated. The scandalized Corrigans mount a frenzied campaign to scoop old Principato into...