An Italian Wife - Ann Hood

⭐⭐

Though Ann Hood's An Italian Wife promised a juicy family saga of successive generations, it doesn't quite live up to its promise and frustrates.

The book opens powerfully, with a visceral presentation of Josephine Rimaldi as a teenage granddaughter in southern Italy who is forced into a marriage and reluctantly immigrates to America. Hood's prose is beautiful in these opening portions of the book, offering a delicious insight into the culture of Italian Americans. 

But it veers into disaster as it leaps unsteadily from generation to generation of Josephine's progeny: what could have been a gripping account of the development of an immigrant family becomes instead an array of poorly conceived figures who flicker too briefly into view before the text takes off again. You only got to know them for one chapter, and then it was on to the next generation.

Compounding the problem is the novel's relentless and often gratuitous sexual content, which stops the narrative cold several times. Sure, some sex is inescapable when attempting to portray a multi-generational tale, but here it seems exploitative rather than insightful as to the characters' psychological makeup.

Hood is talented, and she did a great job of studying her characters, but this doesn't transpire for all. Ultimately, though, An Italian Wife fails to realise its potential due to its lack of cohesion, thinly drawn characters, and overuse of graphic explicitness. What could have been a brave and important novel about the immigrant experience becomes a vermeil-clad mess.