David Kubal on Arturo Vivante
interview

      The loss of childhood, along with the pleasure garden provided by the mother, is the unifying theme of Arturo Vivante's book of interrelated stories, Run to the Waterfall (Scriberner’s) all of which were first published in The New Yorker. His art is a careful, even an exquisite, one, rigorously disciplined lest the emotions, always threatening to the characters or the narrator, should force their way out. The only impulsive act of the book comes in the brief title story, when the narrator (he is sometimes the center of consciousness in the other stories), Giacomo, the middle son of a Jewish-Italian family, who is now living in America, runs to a waterfall while on a visit with his wife and daughter in Puerto Rico. His caprice is rewarded by the re-capturing of power and feeling, associated with his childhood: "flushed and recovering my breath, I felt so much like a boy it seemed strange to have a wife and child there waiting for me. Even the car looked strange—could I be old enough to have a driver's license? Perhaps I would never feel so young again. That run to the waterfall had shaken off my shoulders more than twenty years." His punishment is the sharpened sense of how far he has come from his first home: "I turned the car around, and immediately I felt old again. Thirty-nine. Past thirty-nine."

      If this kind of nostalgia, together with the lament for his childhood, constituted Giacomo's only emotions, and the book's only drama, then these stories would not give one much pause. What saves Mr. Vivante's work from mere melancholy, at least in the middle, is a series of three stories—"At the Dinner Table," "The Soft Core," and "The Bell"—in which Giacomo and his dying and widowed father battle to an inconclusive end, engage each other with spite, vindictiveness, and even hatred, the head of the household being the prize. But if there are new wounds inflicted, there are also moments when their mutual love is recovered, discovered below the layers of accumulated disappointments and betrayals. In "The Soft Core": "Strangely, now Giacomo found that he could talk to his father, easily, affably, and with pleasure, and that his voice was gentle. When his father was well, he couldn't, but now he was reaching the secret, soft core—the secret gentle, tender core that is in each of us. And he thought, "This" is what my father is really like; the way he is now, that is his real, his naked self. . . . His other manner was brought on by age, by a hundred preoccupations, by the years, by the hardening that comes with the turning of the years."

      These three stories constitute a real achievement. They are honest in their portrayal of the animosities that exist and persist between all fathers and sons, and unsentimental about the unspoken love that also occurs between them. But Mr. Vivante's success is not only aesthetic; it is also moral. To give testimony to the inescapable bond between father and son, made up as much of love as of hate, is to recognize a human fact slighted in modern fiction. In this regard, he joins John Updike in The Centaur and Theodore Weesner in The Car Thief to dramatize and to insist upon a truth we need to recall.


Originally published in The Hudson Review.