Nino Ricci

Very disappointing. First volume of trilogy, "Lives of the Saints," (1990) is superb. "In a Glass House" (1993) is second volume and so disappointing, given the high expectations one has after the first volume. Canadian novelist and critic Ray Robertson was on target to say " In a Glass House reads more like a memoir than a novel ...the seemingly endless self-analysis that both [Ricci and Proust] authors' protagonists are given to is often overwhelming in its solipsistic repetitiveness ... at times, a kind of cerebral claustrophobia occasionally descends making one wish for something besides the first-person protagonist's troubled soul as an organizing narrative device." Will pass on trying the third volume of trilogy, "Where She Has Gone" (1997).… (más)

Nino Ricci's "The Origin of Species" novel is one I suggest you read twice---not because it's a spectacular book, but because it's one you'll want to contemplate and reconsider especially in its details.

The main character, Alex Fratarcangeli, is as long-winded and complicated as his name. Or maybe not so much long-winded, since with others, he seems so willing to say so very little in fear of revealing too much of himself. And yet, his internal discourse runs about 10 miles a minute that is fiercely intelligent, yet gravely critical. The man is surely opinionated, honest, and harshly so.

Yet for all his academia (he obsesses in working toward obtaining his doctorate), which inevitably steers him toward being a cut-throat intelligence snob, he is neither outwardly condescending nor rude. If anything, his restraint is so calculated that he can appear to be an enigma to those he's supposedly closest too. Even with all his outward bravado in the face of self-preservation, he is more self-deprecatory than he should be.

There seems to be an internal dual battle: one that restrains him from becoming outwardly and inwardly emotionally involved to the point of indifference---for him, there seems to be a wariness to it that involves too much work---and yet, for all his complaining, distancing, and criticism, it's apparent that people and circumstances in how they unfold, deeply affect him to the basest level whether or not he cares to admit this to himself (or his psychologist!). The novel is after all, almost 500 pages of his thought process where almost every happening is brutally scrutinized, deciphered, and catalogued. As if the character himself is one of Darwin's own specimens to be studied, to be linked to an offset of other events and anomalies. Perhaps this is the point. Perhaps not. What do I know? I'm no academic.

Nevertheless, the random nature of of the book's narrative and the character's movement through this narrative either in recollection or in passing, is both a testimony to the difference between true human nature and its fictional counterpart as characterized in novels---that no one is static, stationary, or moves in a linear path. Neither is a man nor this character ever truly flat or "one way." People have depth of character and layered histories, which is evident in this novel.

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