Only through violence and rejection, he has learned, can one gain the upper hand in power relationships with others -- and also violence provides a way of alienating himself from others, as Paddy fears caring about other people too much because of the lessons he has unintentionally been taught by his family. Despite the love he evidently feels for his parents, because of his failed vigils to keep them together, eventually Paddy says that he wants to look at his father and feel nothing, and says that his brutal fights with other boys in the neighborhood are the most important things in his life, more than family relationships. Denied fulfillment and acceptance at home, even though his innate instinct is to love his parents, this instinct is ripped out of the boy by the circumstances of his life, and like Pearl's children, he tries to forget and emotionally deaden himself.
Nino Ricci's Lives of the Saints presents a warmer vision of family life than Tyler's or Doyle's, although it is characterized by absence as well, namely the absence of the Italian woman Christian's husband, an American who has left the Italian village where her son is growing up. The narrator mother is ostracized by the village because she has taken a lover, a kind of perverse Christian martyrdom exemplified in her choice of a stable for a tryst. It is the place where their son is conceived, like the place where Jesus was born. Because of the reaction of the villagers to his mother, early on the boy Vittoro learns the dangers of love,...
Like the other books, the present is haunted by the past in Ricci's work, but the narrator desires to remember rather than forget his love for his mother and his longing for a normal childhood, just as his mother remembers her lover -- the desire to remember is immediately reflected in the beginning quote from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Vittoro is given things throughout the novel -- a lucky lira, a knife, and other tokens of remembrance that unlike the characters of the darker novels of Doyle and Tyler he cherishes rather than throws away. In all three novels, the dysfunctional past creates the present, but Ricci alone does not see this as inevitably a bad thing, provided that the individual tries to make some positive sense about the difficulties he has experienced, and does not retreat into emotional isolation.
Works Cited
Doyle, Roddy. Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha. New York: Penguin, 1995.
Ricci Nino. Lives of the Saints. Cormorant, 2003.
Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. New York: Ballantine, 1996.
