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It's hard not to see Tempting Faith DiNapoli as a response to Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. Both books recount the youth and adolescence of girls growing up in southwestern Ontario: their familial troubles, cultural awakenings, and tentative encounters with sex. While Munro's Del Jordan is a sprightly, liberated, intellectual postwar teenager, though, Gabriele's Faith DiNapoli is morose and troubled. Faith is the third of four children in a struggling working-class family, and she lives a sad, disjointed sort of life. The DiNapolis are uneasy about nearly everything--their marriage, their children, their Catholicism, their bank statements. Faith embraces all of her parents' worries and embellishes them with troubles of her own: a shoplifting habit, a fondness for booze and soft drugs, a painfully low sense of herself, a series of crises of faith, and, worst of all, a morbid redneck sexuality in which intercourse is synonymous with date rape.
Gabriele's account of Faith's childhood is the strongest part of Tempting Faith DiNapoli--she has a keen eye for the kind of cultural detritus that can perfectly encapsulate a character. Once she moves into Faith's teenage years, however, the novel loses much of its momentum. That may be inevitable, since Faith leads a chaotic, aimless, almost shapeless life, and Gabriele's only fault lies in following this form too closely, leaving readers longing for the directed teenage rage of a book like Mary-Lou Zeitoun's 13. Tempting Faith DiNapoli is a promising debut, but Gabriele hasn't quite mastered the trick of keeping her readers enthralled by a life that even her protagonist isn't too crazy about. --Jack Illingworth --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Books in Canada
Tempting Faith DiNapoli, by Lisa Gabriele, has received a lot of attention and was excerpted in the National Post. The problem is that it is a routine coming of age story and coming of age stories are a dime a dozen. In fact, with minor variations this is the same story as the recently reviewed Heave, by Christy Ann Conlin, and The Sudden Weight of Snow, by Laisha Rosnau, the difference being that Faith DiNapoli grows up in Dogpatch, ON, rather than Dogpatch, NS, or Dogpatch, BC. The story is completely predictable. Faith comes from a poor, dysfunctional catholic family, and as a teenager learns to smoke, drink excessively, do drugs, steal and have lots of sex, as well as developing reasonable doubts about The Church, whose dispensing of guilt (after four children her mother had an abortion and had her tubes tied) has made her mother's life intolerable. Faith's own inability to escape The Church threatens to destroy her life also. There is a tragedy near the end, after which there are hints of a new beginning for Faith. The writing is sprightly and occasionally humorous, as when Faith's low-life brother Mattie and his even lower-life girlfriend Trelly have third trimester church wedding. Trelly's thank you speech at the reception ends with "Oh my God, the baby just fucken kicked just now." Faith's younger sister Hope brings a date to the wedding who, her mother believes is a boy, but is actually a girl. There is too much of the self-absorbed whiner in Faith, so much so that one longs to say to her "Smarten up! Your life isn't half as a bad as you think it is." Actually, Faith's mother Nancy is the more interesting character and could herself be the basis for a novel.
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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