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Lucia, Lucia -- Adriana Trigiani ***
is a novel told in first person about the only daughter of a very close, very loving Italian family in Greenwich Village in the fifties.In fact, this novel reminded me a little of those sweet, sad, sentimental movies of the era. A good daughter of a good family wants to break out of the life that's been set up for her; she makes some good decisions and some very bad decisions, and thus it goes.
I've been thinking about this for days, and my conclusion is this: it's next to impossible to get any complexity or depth or subtlety into a story of a life if it's told in first person, present tense. Present tense works best in scenes that are action-driven, and that's not what we've got here. First person is by definition limiting, so we never get out of Lucia's sanitized, idealized memories, and thus Trigiani has small number of tools to work with. She does attempt to fix this by adding on a present day story at beginning and end about a young neighbor (the audience for her story) but that doesn't quite work either.
Trigiani's readers are many and loyal, and they will disagree with me, but this novel struck me as hollow, stiff and more than a little artificial. That's unfortunate, because she did have some interesting characters to work with.
July 15, 2004 09:14 AM