Salvatore Scibona: The End

— Booklist

“The author’s intelligence as an observer cannot be denied or ignored. . [

The End

] brings new light into the prism of the American novel. . This is a novel to reread, to return to many times over. Be prepared to be stunned.”

— Provincetown Arts

“A debut novel of impressive proportions. . a fascinating story. This is the kind of book in which the reader loses himself because he becomes so much a part of the world he is reading about. . The writing is beautiful. The chances seem good that this talented novelist will still be writing major novels in twenty to thirty years.”

— Salt Lake City Desert News

“For all their bombast and near-pathological love of grandiosity, the modernist writers of the early twentieth century are also responsible for some remarkably simple moments of beauty. . It’s esteemed company to be in, to be sure, but the central image in Salvatore Scibona’s debut novel,

The End

, is so rich and so unabashedly in the modernist vein that it could be included on that shortlist retroactively. As the book progresses, Scibona pans back to show the entirety of this neighborhood with surgical precision. His characters are lush and wonderfully complex, their secondhand English flecked with a hundred subtle imperfections, and the central tragedy that links these disparate citizens together is nothing short of devastating.

The End

takes one more nod from its modernist predecessors in its perfectly formed architecture, which is on display as much as any plot point. It takes those quietly powerful moments and assembles them into something truly monumental.”

— Georgia Straight (Vancouver)

“Possibly the only novel I’ve ever read that legitimately deserves to be called Bellovian. And that’s no small claim.”

— The Kenyon Review

“Though wide-ranging in time and place, the scope of this novel isn’t what makes Scibona a fine writer; it’s the perfect timing of his characters.”

— Harvard Review

He was five feet one inch tall in street shoes, bearlike in his round and jowly face, hulking in his chest and shoulders, nearly just as stout around the middle, but hollow in the hips, and lacking a proper can to sit on (though he was hardly ever known to sit), and wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb. He was faintly green-skinned, psoriatic about the elbows and the backs of the knees, his shaven cheeks untouched by scars of any sort, faithful to a fault to his daily labors, grudgeless against the wicked world, thankful for it, even; a baker of breads with and without seeds, modest cakes, seasonal frosted treats; supplier to all the neighborhood and occasional passers-through; a reader of the p.m. papers, as all of his vocation are, born on the feast of Saint Lucy, 1895; a prideful Ohioan; a sucker of caramel candies when cigarettes he forbade himself from eight o’clock to two; possessor of a broad and seamless brow and a head of sleek black undulant hair, the eyes goonish, unnaturally pale and blue, set deep in the skull in swollen rain-cloud pouches, the eyes of one poisoned with lead, who had not in all his days addressed a piece of speech to more than two persons at once; a looker-right-through-you if he pleased, as old cats look, accustomed to suffering the company of others but always in need of privacy; the baker of Elephant Park; an unambitious businessman; a soul liberated from worry by luck and self-conquest; a weakhearted sparer of the rod with his boys; a measured drinker of spirits who prayed daily for the salvation of his sons and wife; a smoker nevertheless immune to colds and grippes; an ignorer of the weather; a lover of streaks, content and merciful; an unremarkable Christian.

The day’s fifteen hours of labor he divided into three parts: six in the kitchen, solitary; six at the register in front, where he experienced the slow wringing-out of self exacted by the company of others not his own; three again in back, solitary once more unless one of his boys attended him. He was the father of three sons.

Of these it was never the first or last who pried open the back-alley bakery door, the hickory-dickory-dock door, it was called, and came inside to sit postschool with his father while he worked. It was the middle one, unfriended, while the others were lost to the streets. It was Mimmo only ever who came and kept company with him, a boy mute, imperious, sweetly piss-smelling, stool-top observer of things spectral and material, who instead of football and coal-thieving from the rail yards opened the alley-oop door, as it was also called (there wasn’t any handle and the lock was long busted, but a stick wedged in the bottom right corner would send it swinging), and unlonesomed the hottest hours in the back of the bakery afternoons, when the ovens smoldered for the night and the glass doors that opened for the public were locked and blinded. In truth the baker wished his first or last would come instead, the two that owned their mother’s talent for flattery, chin-wagging, exuberant high-pitched singing of patriotic songs, not to say of scrubbing and sweeping.

Despite all his thrift and toil, he had failed throughout the boys’ younger years to lay up enough treasure in this world to provide a private room for their sleeping — all three shared a Murphy bed in the parlor — or, in truth, at times, to furnish the Sunday table with meat or poultry; or to purchase decorator items to enliven the parlor walls, or flounces for the curtain hems, or a sign of any kind to label the bakery storefront; or to pay an assistant’s wage, so that all the bakery’s many chores he did himself. The boys he kept in school. Their mother rolled counterfeit Cuban cigars at the kitchen table.

D’Agostino, the usurer that owned the consignment store, one of his clientele, told him it was the superstition that you couldn’t spend what you didn’t yet have that had kept the serfs in the fields. “You can’t even afford a spinster to punch the till buttons and shell your almonds, which goes to show,” he argued.

No, but it went to show instead the limit of what the baker should hope to own. He understood that America had become great by extending the right to earn money even to money itself, but this was to his mind a practice of the uttermost corruption, since out of whose hands was the first money taking the second money but those of the man who had made it in the sweat of his brow? And therefore no account at any bank bore his name, since where would the interest have come from? Usury! Although he otherwise felt toward his chosen country a tenderness only such as he had seen young girls struggle to conceal for their fathers.

His hopes instead were unpurchasable and plain. He knew what they were — well, he knew what one of them was, he could describe it in words but wouldn’t tell you if you asked because it was not for your ears. He was only a modest person, was not eminent in any way, and his clientele, even the children among them, did not use his family name but called him Rocco, as though he were their servant or cousin.

He was susceptible to dread.

At the least expected time of sweet lonesomeness, in the earliest of morning hours, while he bumbled down the bepuddled alleys beneath the tenement balconettes, where in summer months the caged-in children snored beneath the washing, under the yellow-dark clouds of coal smoke, dread leapt from the shadows and pounded him in his face. Or later, at four in the a.m., while he filled the proofing shelves with the day’s 180 oblong loaves, slowly but slowly rising all around him, all white (picture a colossus in a mausoleum of innocents); or while he was coaling the oven, the dread descended and clocked him. At such times, what could he do to protect himself but name the dread and hope that that would sap its force? So he spoke inwardly the Biblical warning that described it so much better than he could on his own and described as well what his role was in the universal scheme and the consequences of failing in that role. The first time he heard it was at the mass for the last one’s baptism. Monsignor read it in Latin, and he didn’t follow; then in Italian, and he wasn’t paying any attention; then in English, and it did its terrible work: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”