Crossing Ocean Parkway

Rating:
Summary: Part of the problem
Review: A major reason Italian-Americans so often are portrayed negatively is they've not been validated by their intellectual class. Instead, I-A intellectuals sell out to mainstream America for career advancements. This gives credence to stereotypes. De Marco Torgovnick, as she presents herself in this well written but unfortunate book, is a classic example. She benefited enormously from her culture but only begrudgingly gives it any positive strokes. What a disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: 90% negative view of contemporary Italian-American life
Review: Dr. Marianna De Marco Torgovnick is professor specializing in American Literature in the English Department of Duke University, located in Durham, North Carolina. This book is a series of essays about her life during and after growing up as an Italian-American in the Bensonhurst area of Brooklyn, New York. Here are the contents of the essays in her book:

(1) "On Being White, Female and Born in Bensonhurst" describes life in Dr. Torgovnick's neighborhood, looking back from the present. (2) The title essay, "Crossing Ocean Parkway," portrays this famous Brooklyn thoroughfare as a symbol of a dividing line between the author's neighborhood and an outside world she saw as much more desirable than her home arena. (3) "The College Way" charts Dr. Torgovnick's arrival as a new Ph.D. in a small, New England college town, where she faced prejudice because of being Italian-American. (4) In "Dr. Doolittle and the Acquisitive Life," "The Paglia Principle," and "The Godfather as the World's Most Typical Novel," Torgovnick interweaves autobiographical comments with observations on American culture in the areas of individuality vs. community, upward mobility vs. ethnic loyalty, and acquisitiveness vs. spirituality. (5) "The Politics of 'We'" is, to me, the most significant essay in the book, because in it Dr. Torgovnick finally admits that she received valuable things from her Italian-American heritage. Up until this point, she has been constantly directly and indirectly putting down her background. On describing her return home to Bensonhurst because of the final illness and death of her father, she, at long last, though not very strongly, and not as a means of trying assure us she has overcome her past delusion, admits to herself the important gifts her father gave to her. She states: "So [my father] was not devaluing females; he was valuing them in the way he knew best. In fact my father loved his female relatives intensely. He adored his mother….He was a family man, devoted to custom because, in his experience, custom was what kept families going. People had children because people loved children and took care of them; nothing was more basic than that to my father."

As a person who is not Italian-American, but very interested in reading accurate portrayals of this ethnic group, I was disappointed in this book. Many Italian-Americans have justly protested the stereotypical ways they are portrayed by the media. Sadly, a great many of these stereotypes are perpetuated, as in most of this book except he last few pages, by Italian-Americans themselves. If you want to read a much more positive view of Italian-American life (as something to treasure rather than flee), try Richard Gambino's Blood of My Blood.

Rating:
Summary: A dark view
Review: I agree with other reviewers that Torgovnick is relentlessly negative about her Italian-American upbringing, but that is just one example of what I find to be the larger problem in her writings; she's down on everything, but not in any way that you'll find enlightening.

In "On Being White, Female, and Born in Bensonhurst" Torgovnick addresses a racially motivated killing. What makes the essay so unsatisfying is the shallowness of her analysis of the event and her neighborhood's reaction to it. The upshot of her essay is "They reacted that way because that's the way they are. Isn't it awful? (And incidently, I've moved way beyond them in many ways.)" If she wants to knock her neighborhood, all right, but give us some insight into *why* they are the way they are.

This shallow, rather bitter pose towards life typifies the book. Some psychologists maintain that a fundamental personality characteristic that colors much of who we are is the extent to which we see the world as a place of opportunity, life, and pleasure, versus seeing the world as a place of hostility and danger. Torgovnick seems solidly in the latter camp. "The College Way" is a bitter recrimination of the culture at a New England college, "The Godfather" criticizes the literary establishment, and so on. Angry, avenging angels with a sharp eye for dry rot in a culture can be thrilling to read (think of Malcolm X, Martin Luther); a strident malcontent who believes that world is fundamentally unfair to *her* and people like her is not all that interesting.