The Voice of the “Ferriner”: The Fiction and Film of Adriana Trigiani

By S. Bailey Shurbutt

Shepherd University

Adriana Trigiani: Looking Back and Becoming a Writer

Sometimes it takes leaving a place to gain a sense of perspective about its prominence in one’s life and work. Certainly, in the twenty-five years since Adriana Trigiani moved away from the mountain home where she grew up in southwestern Virginia, she has come to understand the rich and diverse nature of her particular heritage. The further she has traveled from those quiet coves and winding mountain roads, the more vivid her memories have become and the deeper her understanding of the region and its people. She writes in her best-selling novel Big Stone Gap: “Sometimes you have to strip away everything to find what you were in the first place” (250).

Trigiani has thought a good deal about the common traits and attitudes of the people of Appalachia and of Italy, from where her own people came. In 1968, her father moved his family from the very Italian town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, to open a garment factory in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Trigiani recalls, from her six-year-old perspective, thinking the new neighbors of Big Stone Gap “were speaking a foreign language.” She didn’t understand why her teachers were not nuns or why her classmates didn’t wear uniforms (Stander 1). However, as the years have carried her a “fer piece” indeed from Big Stone Gap, she has come to believe that she shared much in common with her mountain neighbors. She writes about the commonality between her Scot-Irish and Italians of Appalachia in an essay in Blue Ridge Magazine: “We had much in common with the mountain people—similar stories of hardship and survival, and ultimately triumph. . . . We shared a work ethic and a desire to take care of our families. We shared a love of music, theater and crafts. Local women made gorgeous quilts, in patterns handed down for generations . . . ” (82).

As a young girl in Wise County, Virginia, Trigiani remembers that she knew “first hand the desperation of poverty and the physical toll that manual labor takes on workers.” She recalls that nature was to her both the source of extreme beauty and occasionally extreme tragedy, particularly when the spring floods came or the mountains swallowed up some of the miners who scavenged out their mineral wealth. She saw both the ravages of mountain-top removal and the cacophony of mountain color on a misty fall morning that could take her breath away; and even though she often felt as though she “experienced the life of an outsider,” growing up as she did gave her “a window to the world and an inner strength.” Eventually, Trigiani learned that “there is no such thing as a stranger. Once you share your stories, it makes way for friendship and common ground” (Blue Ridge Magazine 82).

It is hard to gain a clear perspective of what life must have been like in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, for an Italian-American child growing up in the 1970s, without knowing something about the special town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, where Adriana Trigiani was born. Roseto, located in the Lehigh Valley region of extreme eastern Pennsylvania, was and is utterly unique. The town was settled more than a hundred years ago by Italian immigrants from Roseto Valfortore, Italy, who came to America to work in the slate quarries. The people were close-knit and clannish in the best sense of the word, thriving on strong family values and a rich Italian heritage that esteemed good friends, good food, good fun, and community pride. In 1965, the town became the focus of much attention when it was discovered that, though the diets and habits of the men were programming them for early cardiac problems, the rate of heart-attack was almost non-existent. The “Roseto Effect,” as it was termed, was credited more to the unique sense of community and support that the Italian families in the community gave each other than to the Mediterranean diets they might have consumed.

Trigiani’s mother’s family, the Bonicellis, had immigrated from Bergamo and Schilpario, Italy, while her father’s people had come from a small Italian town on the Adriatic near Bari. Both grandmothers were craftswomen and immensely talented—Lucia Bonicelli a designer and seamstress and Viola Trigiani a garment factory worker and businesswoman. Her grandfather Trigiani, a machinist in a mill, eventually opened his own sewing factory, a business that her father had followed and that eventually took the family to Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Hard work and creativity were programmed into Adriana Trigiani almost before she came into the world. Both her parents loved literature and both were great readers, her mother a librarian and her businessman father an avid amateur pianist.

When she was eighteen, Trigiani left Big Stone Gap to attend St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana, majoring in theater. After graduation, she moved to New York City, where she supported herself with temp jobs, working as a nanny, a cook, a house cleaner, and anything else that enabled her to write and work as an actress. She founded a comedy troupe called the Outcasts, but her big break came in 1988, when she was hired to write for the Cosby Show spin-off A Different World.

In the mid 1990s, Trigiani began working on a screenplay that looked back on her years growing up in Big Stone Gap. She took the play to her friend and later literary agent Suzanne Gluck, who suggested that she turn the play into a novel. Trigiani went at the task with her characteristic blaze of energy, writing from 3:00 until 8:00 a.m., before leaving at 10:00 in the morning for work at Showtime, where she was producing Linc’s starring Pam Grier. In six months she had finished the manuscript, and she found that she had created not only what would become a best-selling work of fiction but had discovered a literary genre that suited her perfectly, enjoying immensely the solitary nature of writing fiction. Big Stone Gap was eventually published in 2000, and its success meant that Trigiani’s life could settle into what has become a pleasant routine of producing a novel each year, spending time with the promotional details of being a successful writer, developing screen projects, and devoting time to family—her daughter Lucia and husband Tim Stephenson, an Emmy-winning lighting designer for the David Letterman Show.

Trigiani’s life continues to be structured to an extraordinary degree. She has said of her own personal work ethic: “Every part of my day is planned—and I mean planned. . . . I’m very disciplined. Writing is not a job I do; it’s the way I live. So anybody who’s in my life knows this” (Stander 2). Though she is a disciplined and relatively fast writer, Trigiani’s particular creative process involves long periods of gestation. She said in a 2005 interview: “I think about things for a long time before I write a word. Sudden inspiration works when I’m shopping, but not when I’m writing. It’s really a process that every writer invents anew; there’s no manual. I always think of my grandmother Lucia Bonicelli—a seamstress—who used to say, ‘No one has to see how many times you rip the hem out.’ There’s a lot of ripping going on . . . before a book is published” (Fitzgerald 1-2).

Trigiani’s method has served her and her readers well. Her books have regularly been on the New York Times Bestselling Books List, and in 2006 Big Stone Gap won the Virginia Library Award and was a People’s Choice Award Finalist. In 1996 her documentary about Roseto, Queens of the Big Time, won the Hampton’s International Film Festival Audience Award. Her novel Lucia, Lucia was selected as the 2004 Best Read in England and listed as eighth on the Associated Press List of World Best Sellers, while Rococo was a 2005 Publishers Weekly Fiction Award finalist. Trigiani and her work have been featured on the Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, and National Public Radio, her storytelling success in large part inspired from two rich traditions in her background—her Appalachian connections and her Italian immigrant roots.

Big Stone Gap and “Everywoman’s” Journey

For all intents and purposes, the four current books in the Big Stone Gap series—Big Stone Gap (2000), Big Cherry Holler (2001), Milk Glass Moon (2002), and Home to Big Stone Gap (2006)—form a single narrative. They detail the life and times of Ave Marie Mulligan McChesney, a kind of Italian-American/Appalachian “everywoman” wending her way—stumbling at times—through life and the messy business of living. Ave Marie’s experiences are both unique to her and common to us all, at least in terms of the milestones that she passes as the books’ pages are turned. As her name suggests, Ave Marie is earnest, passionate, often a bit uptight, and possibly too structured in her life; but she is always giving and generous, sometimes to a fault. She and the bevy of friends and neighbors that people the stories are likeable and become, as do the characters in a Jane Austen novel, our literary friends: among them are the steady and sensitive Jack McChesney whom Ave marries; her long-time, best gay buddy Theodore Tipton, who often functions as a moral touchstone when Ave wanders down the wrong path; her spirited daughter Etta, who is an appealing mixture of her passionate Italian mom and her practical Scot-Irish dad; her hard-talking, hard-living librarian friend Iva Lou; her crusty employees Fleeta and young Pearl, whom Ave befriends and gives her drugstore business to when a perverse aunt lays claim to the pharmacy on discovering that Ave is not brother Fred Mulligan’s biological daughter. Indeed, if there is any fault in the novels, it is in the earnest and kind-hearted narrator herself, Ave Marie, who in struggling to do the right thing, to “leave behind . . . more good than harm to the world,” as Trigiani writes in Home to Big Stone Gap (297), now and again crosses the line of narrative “preachiness,” particularly when she is thinking out loud to Trigiani’s gentle readers. However, this flaw is a small price to pay for these memorable and immensely appealing tales and the marvelous humor and good nature that exudes from the pages of Trigiani’s books.

The overlapping themes, characters, and storylines of the Big Stone Gap books complement each other, allowing Trigiani to play one story off the other in a continuous and interlocking narrative that in the last volume clearly leaves the door open to further sequels. As we read the books, we are also mindful of the universal nature of Ave’s experiences, and one finds identifying with the character as natural as breathing. Trigiani’s favorite themes concern the outsider or “ferriner”; finding one’s roots; the dichotomies of choice and chance and of fate and destiny; the necessity of “letting go” of children, painful memories, and old grudges; the secrets that each of us possess; and the difficulty and necessity of coping with change and loss. Trigiani also tackles a number of important social and environmental issues in the Big Stone books, among them mountain-top removal.

As the stories and characters interplay from one volume to another, Trigiani often has occasion to find a resolution for a particular issue or problem in a succeeding book; thus readers learn to look for those connections and “aha” moments. This feature gives the stories a cleverness and degree of profundity that makes them appealing to the thoughtful reader. The books also possess some interesting symbols and narrative strategies, such as the recipes that Trigiani sprinkles throughout the pages of her later novels. This wonderful addition to the novels, including the Italian series, Lucia, Lucia (2003), The Queen of the Big Time (2004), and Rococo (2005), communicates the sensuous joy of food and the ethnic premise that food is not merely for sustenance but an epicure’s accoutrement and pleasurable accompaniment for the milestone events that mark our lives. In this sense, Trigiani uses food in a way reminiscent of Julie Dash in the culinary and visual feast Daughters of the Dust.

When Big Stone Gap opens, Ave Marie is in a state of arrested development. Unusually close to her mother, Fiametta, who has died when the story begins, thirty-five and still unmarried, Ave Marie has lived her life in a community for whom she is both a figure of prominence as the only pharmacist in the town and also somewhat an outsider, a ferriner and Eye-talian. A secret that her mother fortunately did not take to the grave allows Ave Marie to come to some understanding of who she is and resolve her feelings of never quite measuring up and not belonging, which her father Fred Mulligan had engendered into his daughter. Trigiani writes in Home to Big Stone Gap: “There is no romantic love, no husband, no friend, no relationship on earth that can fill the void of a mother’s love lost or a father’s rejection” (108). Though Ave Marie had followed in her father’s footsteps, becoming a pharmacist like him and running the family store, she never felt that she fully pleased him or that she fit in. Ashamed for her daughter to learn that Fred Mulligan was not her real father, Fiametta leaves a letter that allows Ave Marie to discover her family ties and roots in Italy; and this discovery makes all the difference in her life and explains the unnatural coldness of Mulligan. Ave Marie says to Theodore as she begins to come to terms with her inability to trust and love others: “I don’t know what I want. I have spent my entire life trying to give everybody else what they want. I’m not complaining. I like to be of service. I find great purpose in it. . . . Somewhere along the way, I got sucked dry” (Big Stone 155).

Shortly after this revelation, Ave Marie, overstressed and overworked, simply gives way emotionally and physically, feinting one evening as she delivers Christmas ornaments to the ladies at the Dogwood Garden Club. She falls into what she calls “the deep sleep.” Her physical illness, however, is a metaphor for her spiritual crisis—the deep sleep a signal that she will be reborn, changed from the tentative, guarded woman she had become, unable to give her heart to another and accept love. Eventually, thanks to the selflessness of Jack McChesney, who bungles a proposal of marriage but sells his new truck so that she can finally go to Italy, Ave is able to travel to the village of Schilpario where she meets that part of her family long kept secret from her. She also has the opportunity to get to know her wonderfully free-spirited, lothario Italian father who offers her the acceptance and support that Fred Mulligan could never give her. Mario de Schilpario, like her uninhibited friend Iva Lou, teaches Ave Marie to take life one day at a time and to bend occasionally with the wind: “Life is a mystery to be lived,” Iva Lou tells her friend, “not a problem to be solved” (99). Armed with this new sense of self-awareness and perspective, she returns to Big Stone Gap to marry Jack McChesney and begin her life in earnest.

Aside from the vivid characterizations and appealing storyline, the Big Stone Gap stories have a number of interesting qualities. One of the most significant is the way Trigiani shatters traditional stereotypes, both of Italian-Americans and of Appalachians—no media-made Clampetts and McCoys here but full and rich characters that make us want to know more of them. If Iva Lou is hot for a fine piece of lively male flesh, she is also an impeccable clothes horse and the most well-read person in the valley. Jack, miner turned construction company owner in the second volume, is also a superb chef and a wonderfully sensitive dad, even if he doesn’t always share his inner-most feelings with Ave Marie as she would like. Many of the novels’ symbols make us aware of the complexity of life and the moral duality and fearful symmetry of the world in which we live. For example, the underside of the earth—the mines in which Jack works and which both nourish and threaten the daily lives of miners and their families—also presents to Ave Marie and Theodore an extraordinarily beautiful terrain filled with wonder and mystery. Going down into a cavern grotto with their friend Ray, they discover a shimmering palace created from limestone and dolomite. Ray says of the ugly black pool that has drained away leaving the cavern entrance exposed: “You never do know inside the mountain. But over the winter, it started to drain out, so I kept an eye on it. And when all the water done drained off, this is what was at the bottom.” Ray shines the light on the lavender sand and glittering walls, “It wasn’t something ugly [no more]” (251).

Big Cherry Holler picks up Ave Marie’s story eight years after she and Jack have married. Theodore has come “out” and moved on, from local high school band director to University of Virginia music director, and Ave Marie has given the pharmacy to Pearl. When the book opens, Ave and Jack are in a crisis in their marriage, attempting to rebuild their lives after the death of their young son Joe from leukemia. The book focuses on friendship and love and coping with life’s inevitable changes and sometimes tragedies. While this novel provides closure for some of the issues presented in Big Stone Gap, the fourth book in the series, Home to Big Stone Gap, seems to offer closure for Big Cherry Holler and the central idea of this volume—coming to terms with the death of a child. Jack tells Ave Marie, long after Joe has died and Etta has married and moved to Italy to live, that now he understands why they had children: “[M]ost of it,” Jack says, “is really good. And if grief is the price you pay for what’s really good, it is well worth it. . . . Etta was joy, and Joe—Joe was the sadness. And both of them, for as long as we had them here, made me a better man” (84, 301).

Big Cherry Holler also presents a motif that Trigiani will bring to fruition and closure in the third book of the series Milk Glass Moon, which focuses on the mother daughter relationship: the idea of “letting go” of our children and the interesting dichotomy that to the extent that we let them go, we are privileged to keep them. The closeness of Fiametta and Ave Marie, which poses some of the problems Ave must overcome in the first volume of self-discovery, has a very different dynamic in the next two volumes in terms of the relationship between Ave Marie and Etta. Etta is a high-spirited blend of her Italian and Appalachian parents, and the way is not always easy for either mother or daughter. It is on another of those propitious journeys to Italy that the lives of both Etta and Ave Marie are altered, for the precocious pre-teen meets a young Italian, Stefano, whom she declares to her mom she will one day marry—while Ave Marie forms a friendship with an American businessman, Pete Rutledge, who comes dangerously close to awakening feelings that marital troubles with Jack had just about closed down.

Each of the books utilizes the literary convention of the archetypal journey. Trigiani uses the journey as a catalyst for change, growth, and reconciliation in her books. Ave Marie travels to Schilpario in Big Stone Gap in order to discover who she is, to Italy again in Big Cherry Holler to learn that she and Jack must reconnect after the death of their son and that their marriage is worth salvaging, and again to Italy in Milk Glass Moon for Etta to find her own destiny and so that Jack can discover a softer and more creative side to himself in his love for cooking. Finally, in the Home to Big Stone Gap volume, Ave and Jack journey to Scotland after Jack has had a serious illness, and he has the opportunity to come to terms with his own Scottish heritage and Appalachian roots. The journey then in Trigiani’s books always functions both as narrative machinery and as an emblem for self-discovery; thus all of the books have a bildungsroman dimension or heroic coming of age quality that gives them a degree of universality.

The final books in the series, Milk Glass Moon and Home to Big Stone Gap, complete Trigiani’s theme of “letting go” and explore the dichotomies of choice and chance and fate and destiny, as well as offering closure to the theme of secrets that the author has threaded throughout the books. These ideas work in concert in these last books of the series to portray the postmodernist flavor of Trigiani’s writing. Certainly, the fatalistic outlook of both the Celtic and Italian heritage lend themselves nicely to Trigiani’s analysis of life’s strange twists and turns. Likewise, the journey and search for one’s identity also contribute to the postmodernist aspects to the novels and remind one of the stories of Toni Morrison and Margaret Drabble.

The very first scene in Milk Glass Moon takes us to the Wise County Fair, where Ave Marie has her fortune read from tarot cards. The fortune-teller sets up Trigiani’s debate concerning the relationship between chance and choice. Ave Marie references this magical moment again toward the end of the book when she says: “A long time ago I went to a fortune-teller, and she told me that when you have a dream come true, you must then redream. You must not stay in the past. Because all of life changes anyway, and if you try to hang on to happiness or success or even the people in your life, you will be unhappy” (216). This is perhaps one of Ave Marie’s hardest lessons to learn since her daughter Etta means everything to her. Adjusting to Etta’s decision at eighteen to forego college in America, to marry Stephano and remain in Italy, an ocean and a continent away from Big Stone Gap, becomes a formidable challenge for the overly protective and strong-willed mother. But adjust she does. Change is inevitable in life, though we cannot always understand life’s mysteries and strange turns. On the night when Jack, Etta, and Ave Marie are out in the yard looking at the “milk glass moon,” that smoky and silver haze of moon that comes on rare occasions in late fall to the mountains, the three—who will soon be just two—lie on the ground, crossing their arms under their heads and watch the sky. Ave Marie wistfully shares with Etta and Jack: “I like the constellations because they’re fixed. Like tonight. You can’t see any stars because of the clouds. And when the moon is full and there’s a lot of light, it overpowers the sparkle of the stars . . . . But they’re there. . . . They stay the same” (104). Ave Marie and Jack, however, reconcile themselves to the fact that life, that people, even those closest to one, do not stay the same.

When Ave Marie thinks to herself about the secrets that she has kept from her daughter and her husband, she is foreshadowing the essential narrative machinery of Home to Big Stone Gap, the 2006 contribution to the series. Ave Marie muses to herself in Milk Glass Moon, after Etta has asked some questions about Pete Rutledge that come just a bit too close to old wounds and buried emotions: “Like every woman, I have secrets, moments really, that are just for me. It’s a way for me to stay a whole and private person while being a part of my family” (127). Ave Marie’s mother’s secret about her real father, a secret which drives the plot of Big Stone Gap and in some respect touches each of the succeeding novels, finds a clever resolution in Home to Big Stone Gap. This time Ave Marie’s free-spirited friend Iva Lou has a secret, involving a daughter given up for adoption long years ago before she moved to Wise County, Virginia. When her daughter, Lovely Carter, whom she has never seen, shows up one day in Big Stone Gap to find out about her mother and some answers about her life, Iva Lou’s guilt and Ave Marie’s hurt feelings that she wasn’t told the secret work as a wedge between the two women, one that almost brings an end to their long friendship. Theodore, who has now wended his way to New York City as a successful art and stage designer, does his usual to cut through the layers of Ave Marie’s doubts and illusions in order to help the two women heal their rift. The contrast between Iva Lou’s choice and Fiametta’s is Trigiani’s way of suggesting that every woman must decide for herself what is best in such a situation, and no one solution is right for all; choice is always an individual matter.

The other important issue presented in Home to Big Stone Gap involves Jack’s health and gives Trigiani an opportunity to comment on an environmental issue important to anyone with affection and concern for the mountains of Appalachia—mountain-top removal. Both black lung and heart disease are the legacies that Jack has inherited, and his brush with mortality prompts him to create a “bucket list” that Ave Marie is determined to help him achieve. One of the items on the list is to travel to Scotland, and when Theodore informs Ave that the University of Virginia is looking for a house swap for a Scottish playwright they are trying to lure to the area, Jack’s wish is fulfilled. The six weeks that Jack and Ave Marie spend in Aberdeen, Scotland, and the friendship Jack forms with their neighbor Arthur will alter Jack’s life. After health problems determined that Jack could no longer work in construction or go back into the mines, he is courted and offered a job by a smooth-talking mining official who wants to use him and his good reputation in the community to convince his Wise County neighbors that the newer technologies of strip mining make this a viable and economically sound alternative to closing the mines. Ave Marie has talked herself blue against the project, and the friendship she forms with a young university environmentalist, Randy, who has been gathering biological data to use against the project, only makes her more certain of Jack’s mistake to work again for the mines. Arthur convinces Jack that everything we do makes an impact on the world around us, and Jack tells Ave Marie that if one lives long enough, “if you make it to eighty, you realize that the only priceless gift you can leave behind is that you did more good than harm to the world you live in” (297). Jack decides to quit his new job with the mines, and Ave is more convinced than ever that there is some kind of method to the universal madness, to the chaos of life, some force of destiny that works its will, along with our individual wills, to construct each person’s everyday reality. Ave muses on her way back from driving Theodore to the airport when their Christmas visit ends: “[I]t’s hard to believe that twenty years ago Theodore was the band director. Harder still to believe that Elizabeth Taylor choked on a chicken bone [referencing a real-life event that occurs in Big Stone Gap], thus giving Theodore a shot at the big time. He didn’t squander it” (172). Indeed, those serendipitous moments that come our way by chance become profoundly life-changing only when we somehow seize the moment with our own will to create a reality for ourselves.

Lucia, Nella, Bartolomeo: Three Italians in America

Between Trigiani’s third and 2006 Big Stone Gap book come three entertaining novels set in New York City and Roseto, Pennsylvania, all focusing on Italian-American life and continuing many of the themes developed in the Big Stone series: Lucia, Lucia (2003), The Queen of the Big Time (2004), and Rococo (2005). Both Lucia, Lucia and The Queen of the Big Time are inspired by Trigiani’s two grandmothers—the first by Lucia Bonicelli, whom Trigiani remembers as a “wonderful designer and seamstress,” and the second by Viola Trigiani, who worked in a garment factory and was a “crack businesswoman” (Adrianatrigiani.com Interview 1). Both were strong Italian women, hardworking, ambitious, talented; and both had stories that were worthy of recasting into imaginative narratives as Trigiani has done.

Lucia, Lucia, inspired by her maternal grandmother, is a book about making one’s dreams come true and about the gap between appearances and reality, and the glitter that sometimes deceives. The setting takes us back to the 1950s when the road for an ambitious woman was paved with obstacles and detours. Trigiani has constructed a narrative “frame” that consists of a younger woman, Kit Zanetti, a writer who befriends an older lady living in her apartment building, Lucia Sartori. In the course of their friendship, Lucia shares her story and her dream to be a clothing designer in New York City. Lucia’s profession becomes a metaphor for the superficial glitz of the world of haute cỏuture, a world that likewise reveals the art and skill that transforms the mundane and everyday into something lovely. At one point in the story, Lucia’s father, who does not quite approve of the mysterious entrepreneur, John Talbot, who has swept his daughter off her feet, tells Lucia: “You are too enamored of the surface. You like his clothes and his lifestyle, the ease of it. This is a weakness in you, but it is also your talent. You make beautiful garments, and you have an eye for beauty. But you have a way,” he adds recalling how his daughter who works in the special design department of B. Altman’s Department Store could transform the most uncomely matron into a thing of beauty, “of covering flaws with skill” (155).

In the end, her father’s wisdom proves painfully accurate as Lucia is deceived by Talbot. He is not what he appeared, and when he leaves her literally waiting at the church on the day of their wedding, the pain and disappointment are palpable—a disappointment that remains with her the rest of Lucia Sartori’s life. However, unlike Dickens’ Miss Habersham, Lucia’s life is not wasted and twisted, though it does not turn out as she had dreamed and hoped. Fate and destiny present to Lucia the possibility for the successful design career she dreamed of, but family loyalty and responsibility trump her dreams. Trigiani’s wonderful metaphor for the “crass casualty” of happenstance working its will in our lives is found in the so-called “family curse” that Lucia’s brothers blame for her unhappy love relationships. In reality, however, Lucia’s life has been determined by the limitations of her times and her own value system—as chance and choice ultimately shape one’s destiny.

The Queen of the Big Time takes us back in time, to Roseto, Pennsylvania in the 1920s. The book tells the story of Nella Castelluca’s close-knit Italian family and traces the coming of age of this strong-willed, passionate Italian-American woman and her desire to fulfill the American dream and to belong to a community with a rich and vibrant heritage. Roseto is a town like no other—the Italian families who live there are hard-working, proud, and loyal, and it is Nella’s dream to be one of them, though she considers herself an outsider, living as she does on the family’s Delabole farm many miles from town. Nella knows that an education is her ticket to a better life; but as bright and capable as she is, circumstance and fate deem that she and sister Elena go to work in the local factory, when her father is injured in a slate mine accident and the family is faced with losing their farm. Though Nella’s is a story about broken dreams and accommodating to life’s disappointments, like Lucia, Lucia Trigiani writes about the success that sometimes comes with failure and the failure that too often follows success.

At the end of the book—long after she has lost one love and found another, given up her dream of college, and struggled to achieve the American Dream of middle-class prosperity for her family—Nella has an epiphany in a confrontation with her daughter Celeste. Celeste, who has experienced as many advantages as her mother had disadvantages, has just turned twenty and is planning a November wedding. A few nights before the wedding, Nella tells Celeste how beautiful she is, and her daughter replies, “You never say it.” “What do you mean?” answers Nella, as she defends her hard work to provide for her family who, in a single generation, have gone from “the cowshed to Garibaldi Avenue.” Nella tells her daughter: “What you come from is who you are—it’s your starting place. To come from nothing and make something of yourself, to provide for a family, is no small feat.” Celeste, however, replies that theirs was hardly a family since both mother and father were always busy with work. “I barely had a meal with you,” the daughter tells her mother, going on to add that she will not finish college after she marries: “What is the point in getting a degree when I have no intention of leaving my children?” Nella replies that she never left Celeste and son Frankie. Celeste ends the conversation by asserting: “You didn’t have too—you weren’t here in the first place. Ask Frankie. I’m not the only one who felt abandoned” (217-218).

Rococo is a story about forgiveness, renewal, and a delightfully dysfunctional Italian-American family—told with the raucous humor and energy unlike any of Trigiani’s other books. The tale revolves around the remodeling of the Church of Our Lady of Fatima, an edifice that is the center of this very Italian and Catholic Jersey community just across the river from New York City. Bartolemeo de Crispi is a decorator, an artist, who dreams of restoring the church, which becomes a metaphor for revisioning the community, while at the same time retaining those fundamentally important traditions and common ties that bind both family and community. B., as he is known to family and friends, takes on as his assistant his nephew and name-sake Two, for whom he has served as a kind of father figure since the break-up of his sister Toot’s marriage to the philandering Lonnie. Two has dropped out of college and come out about his sexual orientation, while almost everyone else in the family is suffering through some similar catastrophe and/or traumatic life-event.

A plethora of problems abound . . . when B. attempts to finish the church and the funding source for the remodeling project unexpectedly is withdrawn, when his sister Toot ends her affair with Sol the plumber whose personal “plumbing” inconveniently won’t work, when she then proceeds to have an affair with Lonnie, to her kids’ horror, and one family catastrophe leads to another. The humor is lovely, loud, and delightful in this rollicking comedy.

What, however, the story comes down to is, first, about the pleasure that beautiful things give us. Bartolomeo, the narrator of Rococo, tells us that he “may pray in Our Lady of Fatima Church, but I do my worshipping in the House of Scalamandre” (47). At another point, B. asserts to his assistant Eydie who has asked why he became a decorator in the first place: “I don’t like ugly. That, and I come from a family that believes it’s criminal to remove the clear protective wrapping from a lamp shade” (99). Second and most important, Rococo is about family—even wonderfully, wacky dysfunctional families. When Toot learns that son Nicky has impregnated his girlfriend Ondine, of whom Toot has never quite approved, B. tells his sister: “You cannot, you must not, destroy your family over Nicky’s situation. Nothing is as important as family. Nothing. No country, no church, no cocktail ring” (115).

B. utters what must be Trigiani’s most important belief about family, however, when he says at the end of the book, after Two confesses that he is gay: “For me, the definition of family is that group of people who love you for everything you are, regardless of what they think of it” (261). When Trigiani ends the book with a lovely dues ex machine that saves the remodeling of the Church and B.’s job, it is clear that she has also revisioned the family as well as the community, and has shared with us all the discovery that in this wide and diverse world there really are no “ferriners”—just “family.”

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, Carol. “Interview.” June 24, 2005. Online @

http://www.brkreporter.com/authors/au-trigiani-adriana.asp#view040715.

1-8.

Stander, Bella. Interview with Adriana Trigiani. June/July. 2001. Online @

http://bellastander.com/writer/adriana.htm. 1-3.

Trigiani, Adriana. Blue Ridge Country. January/February 2008: 82.

____________. Big Cherry Holler. NY: Ballantine Books, 2001.

____________. Big Stone Gap. NY: Ballantine Books, 2006.

____________. Home to Big Stone Gap. NY: Random House, 2006.

____________. Milk Glass Moon. NY: Ballantine Books, 2002.

____________. Lucia, Lucia. NY: Ballantine Books, 2005.

____________. The Queen of the Big Time. NY: Ballantine Books, 2005.

____________. Rococo. NY: Ballantine Books, 2006.

Trigiani Interview. Online @ http://www.adrianatrigiani.com/faq/html. 1-4.