A read to remember

There is much to love about All This Talk of Love, by Christopher Castellani.  Let me count a few ways.

For one thing, love is not just talked about.  Love is genuinely manifest in the Grasso family, from the first page, where Frankie Grasso and his mother are discussing a woman in a soap opera over the phone.  Frankie praises this woman, faker of a pregnancy; his mother, Maddalena, emphatically condemns her.  Maddalena reserves her praise for her daughter Prima (and husband Tom) for securing a lot to build a home on, and for managing her son Patrick's confirmation--"You know Prima saved you [Frankie] a place at the table for the confirmation."  (7)  All this is something of a burden for Frankie, but it does seem like a happy burden--unlike Frankie's dissertation, which seems like an unhappy burden.

Meanwhile, a restaurant--the Grasso family restaurant, the Al Di La--is a vital player in the life of the family.  Its origins are poignant and powerful.  Antonio Grasso, Maddalena's husband, named the family restaurant in Wilmington, DE, after the Al Di La Café in Santa Cecilia, Italy, where he is from.  He chose the name of this café as a tribute to Maddalena, because, during his courtship of her, he had danced with her there.  Overall, he "and his mother loved the Ristorante Al Di La like it was one of their own children."  (33)  The Al Di La is a center of work and profit for the Grasso family.  It is also a place for pleasure and love.  While Antonio meticulously supervises the restaurant, his children, Prima and Tony, and later his grandson, Ryan, set the tables, wait on the diners, and bus the tables.  Although Prima turns out to be a poor waitress and Tony dies young (more on him later), Ryan labors lovingly at the Al Di La, e.g., at a party for prodigal son Frankie:

On the table are candles and the good white linens and fresh flowers.  "All Ryan's idea," Prima's father told her, when the sight of it...took her breath away.  (285)

Ryan's labor of love at the Al Di La is reminiscent of Tony's labor of love at the Al Di La, where Tony demonstrated--

 ...a talent for design, for making the perfect crease in the napkins, for spacing the knives and forks exactly the right distance apart.  (93)

Tony demonstrated something else, not acceptable to his father Antonio, and that was passion for a waiter, Dante--who, it turns out, is making love to Prima.

After Antonio fires Dante, Tony, an adolescent, kills himself.  Tony's death remains a hole in the fabric of the Grasso family.  It is, really, more than a hole; it is a quiet indictment.  Beneath all the seeming togetherness of the Grasso family, there is a lot of disconnect.  There is a hint of it at the start, when Frankie's friends ask him--

 "But what do you talk about [with your mother]?  I haven't spoken an honest word to my mother since kindergarten."
 "Who said anything about honesty?" [Frankie replies.]   (5)

Meanwhile, although Prima saved a place for her brother Frankie at the table, she is mistrustful of him--with reason.  After all, he does not tell anyone in the family about his lover, Professor Birch.  At no time over the decades does Antonio tell his wife Maddalena (or any other family member) about Tony's homosexuality.  Prima tells no one in the family about her affair with Dante.  All this secrecy in the family belies its supposed unity.

The mother-daughter relationship seems intact, more or less happily--until it isn't.  Prima badly miscalculates Maddalena's reaction to Prima's announcement that she has reserved plane tickets for the entire Grasso family to travel back to Italy.  Maddalena does not "come around" as Prima expects; at the outset, she refuses to go, and she does not change her mind.  Maddalena's point of view is especially compelling throughout.  She wants to bring Frankie back into the family fold, but she does not want to visit what is left of her family in Italy.  She loves her husband Antonio, but she is deeply exasperated with him, too.  She tells Frankie her clear-cut views on love:

When we romance, we do it with our hearts, but we love our husbands and wives with our brains; our children and parents we love with our souls.  (255)

Sadly, Maddalena's brain is fast deteriorating.  This does not mean, however, that she does not feel.  She approves of Frankie's girlfriend, Kelly Anne, she bonds with her sister, Carolina, and she expresses abiding love for Antonio.  Maddalena looms.

The phrase "all this talk of love" comes from Prima, near the end of the story.  This talk of love is rather gossipy--that is, when will Frankie propose to Kelly Anne?--but it reminds Prima of her long-ago love affair with the waiter, Dante, an affair that has had lasting impact on her--enough so that she is bringing it up, years later.  Prima's disclosure of her "crush" on Dante in turn reminds Antonio of his son Tony's fatal attraction to Dante.

"All this talk of love" is, assuredly, more than talk.