END OF INNOCENTE

NINO RICCI'S `WHERE SHE HAS GONE' CONCLUDES A TRILOGY OF IMMIGRATION

Author: By Roland Merullo

Date: SUNDAY, July 5, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

In these early pages, Innocente, as narrator, is simply a set of eyes and ears through which we are introduced to Ricci's Toronto. We do not have much access to his inner world, and this imbues his comings and goings with a certain mysteriousness. Even without any knowledge of the first two novels in the trilogy, ``The Book of Saints'' and ``In a Glass House,'' one will be taken with the gentleness and humility of these opening scenes, and sense the volcanic force that lies beneath the apparently mundane surfaces. Those readers who have followed Innocente through the previous two novels will be completely in the author's grip.

With the evolution of the adult relationship between Vittorio and his sister Rita, the novel gathers its momentum. Ricci is very skilled at bringing minor characters to life with a few deft strokes, and slowly, patiently, he assembles the world of these half-estranged siblings. As soon as it is assembled, though, he explodes it in one shocking scene, the ramifications of which will haunt the characters for most of the rest of the novel.

The surfacing of all these pent-up feelings and the fire that accompanies them allow us to overlook some lifeless couplets of dialogue (`` `Your place looks great,' Rita said. `Thanks.' '' and `` `I tried to call,' she said. `Oh.' '') and, on Good Friday, a factual error that Roman Catholic readers will likely catch.

A third of the way into ``Where She Has Gone,'' I was at once lulled by the mellifluousness of Ricci's prose and kept wide awake by the brother-sister dynamics. The author decorates his tale with sparkling descriptions, such as this one of Niagara Falls: ``It was such a relentless thing, this surge and surge and surge, this aeons-ancient heaving forward like the bloodrush of a continent.'' There are also moments of profound introspection: ``It occurred to me, in this state, that there could be a dissolution point in a life where the logic of cause and effect suddenly ceased to apply, where there was not enough sense in things for any forward line to present itself. Perhaps that was how people came to kill themselves: they simply reached this blankness they disappeared in, this moment when the story of their lives no longer cohered.''

What follows this impressive opening, however, is a series of chapters that start off interestingly enough and then abruptly turn into dead ends. Again and again Ricci approaches an emotional crisis, a partial solution to the puzzle of the past or the puzzle of the present, then resorts to blurry inconclusiveness. It is unclear whether this technique is meant to replicate Innocente's confused state of mind or to tantalize the reader with mystery and unfinished business. But the effect, for me, was that I began not to care so much about the fate of the indecisive narrator; I began to feel, after all, like the hooked fish, being reeled in a ways and then let to wander, reeled in, let to wander.

In this middle section, Innocente's depression, passivity, and humorlessness evoked more aversion than empathy; and Rita's temporary disappearance from the novel sapped the story of its urgency. The same indirection that had been so intriguing at the start made the middle feel purposeless and a bit contrived.

Things regain their balance not long after Innocente sets off to meet his sister in the small Italian town where he was born. Here, again, the author's talent for creating believable characters shows itself at full force. Innocente's Italy is brutally unsentimental, too much so at times. The glorious, messy, noisy city of Rome, for example, is reduced, through the lens of Vittorio's depression, to a smelly collection of bad history. The reader longs for a peek at the beautiful, for one bright star to pierce this gloom, but Ricci seems determined never to let himself be accused of sentimentality. Fair enough -- especially when the narrator is an Italian-Canadian intellectual dragging the kind of weight (a mother's disgrace, a father's suicide, a sister in danger of sinking) that Vittorio carries. But this insistent gloominess is a weight on the story, too, and the reader does not always want to bear it.

Toward the end of the novel, Ricci begins to allow his characters some moments of what has come to be called ``closure.'' And here, as at the start, his gentle, hands-off touch works beautifully. The full verisimilitude of Ricci's world flourishes anew. We care again -- about Rita, about Vittorio. And we are impressed by the author's courage in resisting cheap easy answers to complex moral and emotional dilemmas.

The last two chapters are so well written and moving that they come very close to making us forget completely the problems of the middle section. Ricci's knowledge of the darker precincts of human emotion are obvious here, as is the fact that ``Where She Has Gone'' and its sister novels form, at their essence, a brilliant study of the way shame is passed down through generations. Like any other inherited illness, shame grows silently in the innocence of childhood, then stifles the victim's own blossoming, never allowing him to see beauty in himself or to allow others to see it. Nino Ricci understands this dynamic, and gives it its rightful place in the pantheon of human misery. In creating the troubled Innocente family, he had the courage to build a story around it without a tinge of preaching, without the mercy of even a momentary joy. In ``Where She Has Gone,'' Vittorio Innocente is not an easy guy to like or to feel sorry for; but at the novel's conclusion, in a last fine image, we are glad to see him reach a sort of peace.