In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu

Gathered around a metaphorical campfire, the members of the extended Girgenti clan take turns regaling us in this robust, beguiling novel about family and the immigrant experience in the first half of the 20th century. Ardizzone, the author of two previous novels (Heart of the Order, etc.) and a story collection (Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood), doesn't cleave to conventional narrative here--each chapter is a distinct vignette, with occasional overlaps as the characters intersect--so he depends instead on exquisite language and anecdotal charm to propel the narrative. The cumulative effect is of a kind of Sicilian Canterbury Tales, rich with fable and folklore and religion even as it traces a familiar pattern of immigrants struggling to survive in a hostile new world. One by one Papa Santuzzu sends his seven children off to ""La Merica,"" while he remains in Sicily with his dead wife and his hard patch of garden dirt. But the gesture, intended to save his family from a life of poverty, inevitably drives them apart; in America, the siblings scatter from coast to coast and reunite only when fate and an unexpected funeral pull them back together. The novel, then, becomes a eulogy for a lost culture. Ardizzone nods to traditional immigrant tales: scenes of Ellis Island, sweatshops and brutal discrimination at the hands of the upper class. But the book's lasting power derives less from its pointed, perfunctory snapshots than from Ardizzone's sharp metaphors: when the police shoot a striking worker, for instance, she makes ""a bird's nest of her thin, white fingers"" to cover her wound; for most readers, that bird's nest will linger longer than the unjust death. Agent, Kit Ward. (July)