Addio anni Trenta : Like Lesser Gods e la via al romanzo italoamericano di Mari Tomasi

Farewell to the 1930s. Mari Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods and the Italian American Novel Cinzia Scarpino The article offers an account of how Mari Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods, a novel written between 1941 and 1949, overturns some of the central motifs of the 1930s’ proletarian novel in order to portray an Italian American narrative reoriented toward a positive outcome of cultural integration. Set in Granitetown, the fictional counterpart of Barre, Vermont (by then, “the largest granite center in the world”), the noveltells the intergenerational story of an Italian American family of stonecutters and quarry workers but chooses to silence political discourses of power by suppressing or subverting historical and cultural references to strikes – the unifying chronotope of the “strike and conversion novel” in the 1930s – and the plight of silico-tubercolosis – a recurring motif of the immigrant novels or ghetto pastorals of the same decade.