CONVERSATION WITH JOHNNY, a novel

CONVERSATION WITH JOHNNY is a novel of power and sex in which the gangster, Johnny, and poet, Vincent, engage in a series of conversations centered around not crime nor poetry but about a married, left-handed, red-haired woman named Lefty. Johnny is, yes, a mob boss but also an advisor.. This project preceded the popular TV series The Sopranos and the film Analyze This,

Author Anthony Valerio:

"Conversation with Johnny is very special to me because it constitutes at least my own dual cultural nature, the writer and the individual of power, the local gangster, whom most of us experienced in the old neighborhoods. Here, they merge into one. Out of this duo comes, I hope, a kind of closure on the stereotype we also all know, that of the godfather myth. On an exalted plain above all of this, to my great pleasure, is the alluring, elusive woman."

"The plot of Valerio's novel is refracted through a series of vignettes relayed through the narrator's conversations with an approachable mafia don (the titular Johnny) and the narrator's lover, a married woman nicknamed Lefty living a quiet life of married desperation (until she meets the narrator). Like a beam of sunlight that bends, separates into colors, and then reunites after passing through a variety of media, the narrator's conversations express a conflicted relationship with love (not only of women, he tells us, but "the way I view everything.")

The narrator, though preoccupied with universal questions, is resolutely, concretely Italian-American, and through his conversations with Johnny he engages both with the local meaning of this identity (in New York City) as well its larger temporal and geographical extensions: back in time to Garibaldi in Italy; across the ocean to Sicily and beyond. As one of the fictional narrators within the novel/autobiography says while musing over the confluence of the Hudson River and Atlantic Ocean, "For years I wondered exactly where the fresh water turns to salt." Key to this novel, and nowhere better or more beautifully articulated than the conversation that follows about how freshwater and saltwater fish both survive there, is the theme of immigration and dual identity. The novel, like the Hudson, is intimately "local" in its quotidian contact with Italian-American culture in New York, but never loses contact with the ocean that lies beyond, and is quite at ease moving just as intimately across the Atlantic and not only across space but across time to various locales in Italy. And then there are the imaginary locales of Nicholas's (the narrator's) memory and desire, which add the third dimension of imagination to Valerio's invented autobiography.

If this sounds "literary" (unfortunately this term is a pejorative in some circles), it is also winningly funny, full of the wise humor of Valerio's narrator Nicholas, who is a persona of the engaging writer himself. Though the fragmented plot and shifts between different conversations and locales is at first challenging for readers seeking a more traditional linear novel, Valerio's Conversations has a seductive power that does its work subtly and silently, so after it ends you will feel, without really understanding why, like a silence has fallen after a long-lost friend has departed. And the fact that this is accomplished not through an operatic voice but through a series of apparently desultory conversations is an impressive feat of Valerio's dialogic style.--Professor Eric Goldman

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