An Italian education

Parks's Italian Neighbors chronicled his arrival in Italy and his initiation into the byzantine complexities of Italian social and cultural life. Never a tourist, no longer a "transient," he focuses, this time, on his children, born and bred in Italy, and on the other children in the small village near Verona where he lives. Parks builds a fascinating portrait of Italian family life: its often bizarre foibles and its extraordinary solidity, the moral contradictions, the rituals and rites of passage. With the eye for detail, intrigue, quirky connections, and character that has brought him so much acclaim as a novelist, Parks brings out the splendidly, sometimes dangerously, theatrical nature of Italian relationships, finding the roots of that explosive Latin cocktail of sentiment and calculation in his children's adventures at school, at home, in church, on the playing fields, in the countryside, in the shops and museums. And the whole panoramic journey winds up with a deliciously seductive evocation of an Italian beach holiday that epitomizes everything that's best about life in Italy and everything that makes it so different from our own.