The Archeology of a Good Ragù: Discovering Naples, My Father, and Myself by John Domini

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Archeology of a Good Ragù: Discovering Naples, My Father, and Myself by John Domini Robert L. Shuster (bio) the archeology of a good ragù: discovering naples, my father, and myself John Domini Guernica World Editions https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771835534 285 pages; Print, $17.95 Imagine a terrace above a city of antiquity, a view of a glittering bay, a Campari in hand, and across the table an engaging fellow regaling you with savvy cultural observations, tasty reminiscences, and eye-opening wartime tales. If that sounds appealing but you can't swing the airfare, fix the drink yourself and crack open a copy of The Archeology of a Good Ragù, wherein the affable jack-of-all-trades John Domini (novelist, critic, poet, journalist, translator) will tell you about Naples. Author of three novels set in this complex, melting [End Page 81] pot of a city—famous for pizza, postcard views, and Vesuvius; notorious for crime and grit—Domini now delivers a freewheeling memoir to explain how and why the place has come to mean so much to him. If you're wondering about the title, the book is not a tour of Italian cuisine (though the region's pleasures don't go unnoticed). Rather, the sauce is mostly metaphorical—a bubbling mix of lives, sights, and feelings that Domini encounters and discusses, turning up surprises and a couple of shockers. "The Neapolitan ragù," the author writes, "is always in ferment, yielding briny intrigue." Much of the book's intrigue centers around Domini's father, Enzo Vicedomini, who grew up in Naples under the Fascists and the Nazis and then fled his country in 1948, at age twenty-three, for Manhattan. He shortened his last name to a word of the church and went on to prosper in the food industry, putting an Italian spin on American standards. His success had always accounted for his eagerness to emigrate, but had there been another reason? He'd hardly ever spoken about his teenage years in the war. It was not until Domini was forty, in a mid-career malaise with a failing marriage, that he felt an urge to dig into his family's past, to make more meaningful connections to his heritage. "In order to get a handle on the rest of my life," he writes, "I needed to know my father and his city." Domini begins the account of his quest like an easygoing raconteur, less concerned with chronological sequence than with capturing what he calls the "confounding total immersion" of Naples, where "there's no end of 'now.'" Impressions stream into memories, which bring on sudden thoughts, confessions, literary references, and historical asides. Early on, a description of votive figures leads to octopus in an insalata, margherita pizza, an old photo of Domini's father, women's shoes, Margherita the queen, the suicide of the Siren Partenope, Sibyl of the Aeneid, roughnecks with facial scars, and finally back to that photo—all within a few pages. The sentences themselves keep you on your toes, too, mixing the fine-tuned perception exhibited in Domini's literary criticism (see his excellent The Sea-God's Herb [2014]) with the punchier, improvisational style of his more recent fiction. Here's one view of Naples (with "monkey" referring to an ancient Greek settlement): [End Page 82] Whenever I pull out of downtown on a ferry, headed for the monkey islands, the retreating urban landscape looks like a palimpsest: a tattered sedimentary buildup. The heights west of the docks present a stipple of ridges and colors, a slope known as Pizzofalcone, the falcon's hood. I can just see it, the bird in its hood. Or maybe not (what do I know about falcons?), and anyway this quarter too has more than one story to tell. So does the book. As the family's harrowing experiences in World War II gradually come to light, Domini brings you scenes from modern-day Naples, notably in romance, immigration, and organized crime. One afternoon he ends up in a cramped studio apartment, posing without a shirt for a woman who's painting portraits of male artists and writers. The scene reads like a...