In this excellent study, Scambray argues that his subject is not the Italian American novel, but the Italian American novel in California. The characters in this fiction negotiate an American identity against a Western landscape, and hence the stereotypical portrait of the Italian American as eastern, urban, poor, and criminal has little relevance to a fiction that treats a new kind of immigration experience.
Scambray discusses eleven novels in all, and a consistent theme is that characters are often forced to reroute their plans as the past erupts into the present. Scambray has written an important book, one that adds to the exciting, burgeoning scholarship on California's authors.
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