The preface to this novel probably best explains theater professor Robert Benedetti’s first foray into fiction. Longing for the Chicago neighborhood where he grew up, he “decided to try to write it back into existence.”
The novel, a 2005 selection of the Sons of Italy Book Club, tells of 10-year-old Joey, and his discoveries about life, love, death, and social realities in his neighborhood, essentially a transplanted Tuscan village.
Like an archeologist, Benedetti dug into his memory “to unearth my old Chicago neighborhood just off Oakley Avenue in 1948. When enough had been uncovered, it began to live again, and to take on a life of its own. Some things began to happen, things that really hadn’t happened but might have.”
Similarly, people who might have been there but were not became real as the neighborhood grew with each word Benedetti added to the page. The protagonist of the novel is, in the words of one reviewer, “described so well that it makes me feel this is a real biography.”
Take this passage about Joey’s Confirmation ceremony:
Now that he was ten, Joey was to go through the ceremony again, this time to be confirmed in the faith. The procession was just as before, except led by a new bishop. Father Louis, now three years older and more bitter than ever, followed with the acolytes and billowing smoke. The younger children in white receiving the First Holy Communion were next, followed at last by those being confirmed, who were dressed in red robes. Joey found himself enjoying this ceremony much more than the first. He liked the feeling of seniority, as well as the flashy red robe, beneath whose voluminous folds he wore comfortable pants. Most of all, he had enjoyed the chance to choose a confirmation name from a lengthy list of saints, the selection being meant to signify a commitment to follow the saint’s example in a particular arena of spiritual endeavor. For Joey, the philosophical implications of this choice were less important than the opportunity to compensate for his lackluster middle name, Lawrence … There was, alas, no saint Rigoletto, but his eye fell on the name Aloysius. It had quite a ring to it, he thought.
But, Benedetti reminds us, “although it is inspired by real events, places, and people, this is finally a work of fiction.”
Author Marilyn Levy (Run for Your Life, The School Story, and Bride of the Wind), describes The Long Italian Goodbye as “charming and honest and totally absorbing.”
Reviewer and novelist Adriana Trigiani calls the work a “beautiful first novel,” and predicts that readers will “laugh and cry, and be very sad to leave the world Mr. Benedetti paints so splendidly.”
Benedetti has authored several nonfiction works including The Actor at Work, now in its ninth edition. As a producer, he won Emmy awards for two acclaimed HBO movies: Miss Evers Boys (1997) and A Lesson Before Dying (1999). He has also directed theater productions across the United States and has acted for the stage and screen. His TV acting career included roles on Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and Cheers.
