Word: principato
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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...
...PRINCIPATO by Tom McHale. 311 pages. Viking...
...since Tennessee Williams' no-necked Flynns from Memphis has there been such a terrible family of Irish-Americans as the Corrigans of Philadelphia-"a wealthy tribe of shanty Irish, they'd take the sweat from the poor dead Jesus." Principato, the beleaguered hero of this hilarious novel, finds out about the Corrigans the hard way by marrying Cynthia, the barge-footed only daughter of the clan. Battening off a string of funeral homes and ghetto bars, his in-laws scheme constantly within a parochial Jansenist world of indulgences and spiritual bouquets. For them, a family's social...
...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...