12/04/2023
Ausiello’s piercing debut chronicles one long day in the lives of a down-on-its-luck working-class Italian-American family living in a tight Bensonhurst apartment on July 4, 1976, the date of the nation’s much ballyhooed bicentennial. While seemingly the rest of the U.S. is caught up in celebration, the four members of the Agnello family are in various states of individual and collective turmoil that regularly overlap in a feeling of tension or worse. Mother Dee, frustrated from years in a stifled, going-nowhere marriage, is resigned to protecting her young sons, Tony and Alex, from the perceived dangers of the neighborhood, as she stresses over raising her sons into respectable young men, a far cry from their father Paulie, a phone company worker whose union has endured a prolonged strike.
Happiness, like material success, seems to elude the Agnello family, who snap at each other more loudly than the fireworks snap-pops (each a “teardrop-shaped twist of white paper”) that Alex flings to the pavement. Such precise, evocative description brings the milieu—and the fraught dynamics— to vivid life, as Dee scoffs and Paulie wagers tuition money on a race horse. The cold distance between them of course has an impact on their young sons, especially Tony, who is bright and athletic at 14, strains to step out from his mother’s over-protectiveness and, between stickball and confrontations, begins to grow up during this long, hot day. (His new girlfriend—Maria, naturally—has a reputation for volatility and more.)
WIth wit, feeling, and an escalating sense of urgency, Ausiello dramatizes the gulf between a nation’s performance of its exceptionalism and the lived reality of its citizens in an era of malaise. The slice-of-life structure offers rich context, though at times, as when Paulie longs for one of the burgers grilling next door, readers may wish for more eventful storytelling than a single day allows. Still, this is an accomplished, impressive debut from a writer who likely has more to give.
Takeaway: Vividly evoked 1976 Brooklyn story of a family fraying as a nation celebrates.
Comparable Titles: Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish.
Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A-
