Photo: Jack Delano

Publishers Weekly

[Starred Review]

A well-crafted, unabashedly literary debut.  Scibona's prose contains the off-kilter rhythm and startling flourishes of imperfectly acquired English spoken by immigrants, and his narrative is laced with the overheard fragments—revelatory in their incomprehensibility—that James Joyce called "epiphanies." . . .  A demanding but rewarding novel.

[A] portentous, labyrinthine debut novel of the epic search for home and the promise of a better future . . . Brooding, intermittently gorgeous, bittersweet, and devastating, Scibona’s storm-cloud novel revolves around a murder and twists together intense inner monologues and heartbreaking descriptions of smothering poverty and thankless labor, fractured families, and stabbing revelations of prejudice and racism. Add a ghost and subtle allusions to the radical changes industrialization wrought, and this is one loaded novel about twentieth-century-America’s growing pains.

Booklist

Engulfing. Entangled. Fate-laden. Flinty. Dry-eyed. Memento meets Augie March.  Didion meets Hitchcock. Serpentine. Alien. American. Ohioan. McCarthyite (Cormac). Bellowed (Saul). 

Esquire

The End is a throwback modernist novel. Scibona's subject is the meaning of place, time, consciousness, memory and, above all, language. Think not only Faulkner, but also T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

The author’s intelligence as an observer cannot be denied or ignored . . . [The End] brings new light into the prism of the American novel . . . This is a novel to reread, to return to many times over.  Be prepared to be stunned.

Georgia Straight (Vancouver)

For all their bombast and near-pathological love of grandiosity, the modernist writers of the early 20th century are also responsible for some remarkably simple moments of beauty.

Think of the skywriting scene in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or the final lines of W. B. Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”, where the aging narrator retreats from a life of unrequited love to “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”.

It’s esteemed company to be in, to be sure, but the central image in Salvatore Scibona’s debut novel, The End, is so rich and so unabashedly in the modernist vein that it could be included on that shortlist retroactively.

The scene is 1950s small-town Ohio, during a frenzied parade marking a Catholic festival. Residents of the racially divided neighbourhood of Elephant Park have packed the streets on a muggy August evening to see a statue of the Virgin get carried through the town in celebration. Rocco LaGrassa, a hard-nosed Italian baker “shaped like a lightbulb”, stands on a rooftop and watches a quick-spreading piece of gossip bring the parade to a crashing halt.

This image is the book’s centrepiece, both thematically and aesthetically, and Scibona eventually recasts the story from six different perspectives. For Rocco, it’s a painful reminder of the family that is in the process of abandoning him: “Eleventh Avenue bled people into all its tributary streets” in the aftermath, and nearby children burst into tears, with “the welched-on promise of a fireworks display…the height of betrayal”. Forty-five pages in, and already there’s an encyclopedia’s worth of heartache.

As the book progresses, Scibona pans back to show the entirety of this neighbourhood with surgical precision. His characters are lush and wonderfully complex, their secondhand English flecked with a hundred subtle imperfections, and the central tragedy that links these disparate citizens together is nothing short of devastating.

The End takes one more nod from its modernist predecessors in its perfectly formed architecture, which is on display as much as any plot point. It takes those quietly powerful moments and assembles them into something truly monumental.

—Michael Hingston

Possibly the only novel I’ve ever read that legitimately deserves to be called Bellovian. And that’s no small claim. (Also further proof . . . that Graywolf puts out some of the best, and best looking, literature today.)

Kenyon Review

Deseret News

(Salt Lake City)

A debut novel of impressive proportions . . . a fascinating story. This is the kind of book in which the reader loses himself because he becomes so much a part of the world he is reading about  . . . The writing is beautiful. The chances seem good that this talented novelist will still be writing major novels in 20 to 30 years.

[R]hapsodic and interior, inventive in its language and structure, and unflinching in its portrayal of the desolation and disenchantment that afflicts low-luck citizens. . . .

Part of the might of Scibona’s story resides in its steadfast refusal to be easily summarized.  The six key characters traverse loops of time and location, and not always smoothly, since Scibona cares more about Jamesian interiority and the moral arithmetic of D.H. Lawrence than he does detective tale plotting.  Still, there is a calamitous mystery in the lungs of this novel; one goes from chapter to chapter expecting horrendous spiritual crimes to cripple all involved and perhaps usher in the apocalypse . . . .

The diction is both unexpected and exact (typically a poet’s trick)—“bepuddled alleys,” “caged-in children,” “yellow-dark,” “dread leapt”—and that metaphor “a colossus in a mausoleum of innocents” is an eerie brush of brilliance . . . .

Scibona has shaped a searing portrait of an entire Ohio community much like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, although Elephant Park is a more menacing locale than Anderson’s middle-class would-be utopia . . .

Scibona’s story pivots on spiritual malaise instead of what Emerson called “Man Thinking.”  Bellow cares considerably less for the spirit than he does for the mind.  But when Scibona’s people delve into intellectual matters, that delving is always in service of spirit . . . .

Scibona excels at dialogue, and not the hardboiled breed of banter that wins Richard Price and Elmore Leonard so much praise, but dialogue as Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, and Samuel Beckett understood it: verbal interaction is for dramatizing confusion, for revealing the individual mindscape of the character speaking, and not for advancement of plot or the summing up of events.  Anthony Trollope, in his Autobiography, believes that dialogue is “agreeable” only if “it tends in some way to the telling of the main story.”  Many a new writer would benefit from that guidance, but Trollope did not mean that dialogue should turn into exegesis or take on the work of narration.  In Scibona, as in Kafka, Chekhov, and Beckett, the dialogue tends to the narrative engine, but only insofar as the characters’ inner bedlam is necessarily tied to that engine . . . .

Combine Scibona’s themes of the immigrant experience, ethnicity, spirituality, and the dreams of the lowly, and America itself emerges as the real central character of his narrative.  As the widow Mrs. Marini remarks to herself: “America is the deep.”  Deep enough to kill, deep enough to save . . . .

Scibona has crafted a masterful novel of serious consequence, a novel unafraid to split into the breastplate of humankind and aim a floodlight at the demons dancing there.  If the poetic truths and dark spiritual scope of this novel disconcert you, fine. But they will also remind you that the novel is thriving beyond the bottom-line-bound New York  publishing industry, where so many of the acquisitions, especially of debut novels, are being made by marketing committees instead of by individual editors with literary inclinations.  The legendary Maxwell Perkins shrieks from his grave.  But he doesn’t shriek only. Sometimes you can hear him push out a sigh of relief.

The Southern Review

Kirkus Reviews

Cedar Rapids Gazette

Salvatore Scibona opens his debut novel, The End, with a spectacular sentence that describes one of the book’s key characters in impressively complete detail . . .  It alerts the reader that he or she is entering a fictional space in the company of an assured, slightly show-offy narrative voice.  By the time the period arrives and the reader gets to take a full breath, the hook has been set.

A page and a half later, Scibona, a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, devastates the reader with a simple, five-word sentence.

Thought he was good on the first page?  Wait until he pulls the rug out from under you on the third. 

The End is a complex novel difficult to describe succinctly.  It centers on a single day—August 15, 1953—in an Italian neighborhood in an Ohio community.  Scibona intertwines the stories of six characters with his deeply realistic yet deeply stylized prose.

The book’s complexity is of an appealing variety, requiring the reader’s close attention.  It fully rewards that attention as the various threads are pulled apart and brought back together.  The book contains much sadness leavened with the beauty of Scibona’s craftsmanship . . . 

The reader . . . desire[s] that the book might not end at all.

American Book Review

[H]ard-headed yet lovely, precise yet inventive . . . delicious turns of phrase, combining skewed aphorism, urbanity with all the senses open, Roman Catholic arcana and Southern Italian superstition, and plain old perspicuity about the human animal as it ages and changes.  Physical description, too, proves on the money and felicitous.

. . . Another endorsement, from ZZ Packer, makes the daunting comparison to Saul Bellow—daunting, yet notably fitting.  Granted, The End isn’t set in Chicago, where Bellow drew his inspiration. It’s Cleveland for Scibona, but he fleshes out a scrabbling immigrant Cleveland, an Italian-American neighborhood he calls “Elephant Park.”  Both Augie March and his author would recognize the place, and not for nothing does the new novel’s central date fall in 1953, the year that Augie’s Adventures saw print.  Scibona knows the big shoulders on which he’s set up his own tuner, the better to bring in his own metropolitan oratorio.