A Novel
by Jay Parini
(New York: Henry Holt, 1986)
The Patch Boysis a novel about childhood's end, the summer of 1925, and labor troubles in the Pennsylvania anthracite country. Its hero-narrator is Sammy di Cantini, a fifteen-year-old growing up in a "patch," one of the poor housing clusters built near the mines. A person determined to rise above his class, at a time when background is still everything, Sammy comes from a large, eccentric family of immigrant Italians. It includes his mother, desperately trying to hold things together after his father's death in a mining accident, and his brothers Louis, a budding gangster, and Vincenzo, a union organizer and local baseball hero. During the summer--a summer when Calvin Coolidge was president and America, too, was coming of age--Sammy roams the banks of the Susquehanna with his orphan friend, Will Denks; falls in love, disastrously, with Ellie Maynard, the Protestant girl whose world he aspires to (a world he mostly views as a golf caddy); travels to New York for a boisterous and dangerous week with his Mafia brother; dabbles with the notion of becoming a priest; and watches helplessly as his organizer brother becomes involved in a struggle he cannot possibly win.
By turns nostalgic, funny, and tragic, The Patch Boysis hardly a conventional saga of teenage initiation. There is a spunky, goodhumored optimism about this novel, as well as vividly unpredictable imagery that could only come from a talented poet--which Jay Parini is.