Darkness Falls

Del Vecchio wears his heart on his sleeve in this often overwrought account of a suburban Connecticut Italian family struggling to maintain its old-country values in a fast-changing modern world. At the heart of the struggle are John Panuzio, a 50-year-old ad executive whose vision of idyllic family life is threatened by a the imminent downsizing of his job; an aging live-in father whose health problems threaten the family's emotional resources; a spouse with a high-powered publishing career who's considering an affair with a co-worker; and an athletic son trying to deal with a variety of teenage temptations in a racially troubled school system. To escape from his problems, Panuzio retreats into a series of nostalgic childhood fantasies that focus on the strength of his extended family, but he's brought back to reality when his father suffers a stroke, his wife becomes the victim of a corporate power play and the teenage son of his best friend, an African American, is murdered after a high school auto accident that also deeply affects the ad exec's boy. Panuzio takes up the dead youth's cause in the local paper, penning a series of articles in which he speaks out against racism and inequality in the community, but his company rewards his idealism with a demotion, and a final family revelation after his father dies threatens to shatter his self-image irrevocably. Del Vecchio (The 13th Valley) is a sensitive writer who raises some compelling issues, but he seems unable to resist the temptation to go for melodrama over understatement. He also allows his primary characters to indulge in a variety of rambling diatribes about values old and new, burying the subtle nuances of a decent story in waves of verbiage. Author tour. (Sept.)