Family Matter

As its title suggests the novel is a family story or rather several of them which form the matter of which Family Matter is made. They are primarily episodes about the narrators father hospitalized for surgery when the novel opens. The stories expand in memory to cover the fathers early life in America and then his origins in Italy where the narrator travels to pursue a secret he hardly knows exists--until that is he meets the intriguing Maddalena who with her teenage daughter not only lives in the house once belonging to the fathers family but knows his story and the origin mystery that forms a key part of the tale. In pursuit of these revelations the narrator upends his life and winds up in Naples as lo scrittore the formal writer of the family saga presented here.