Geremio is a proud bricklayer, emigrated from Italy and living on New York’s Lower East Side. He works on a job with his fellow immigrants and tries to keep them safe as their site boss cuts corners on building materials and safety procedures. The novel opens on Good Friday, and Geremio is anticipating payday. He has just bought his own house for his wife, Annunziata and their seven children, and thinks that life in America epitomizes the dream it promises. On that day, however, Geremio falls victim to a horrific industrial accident, one of the most harrowing in American literature. Because of weakened mortar, the brick wall built by his crew collapses and hurls Geremio into the mortar forms, his arms outstretched in the form of a crucifix, as the mortar and forms smother and crush him.

Di Donato takes the reader into the anguished mind of Geremio as he feels his bones break into fragments, as he desperately uses his teeth to try to gnaw through the forms so that he can breathe and call for help. We hear him pray and we hear him lament his loss of his family and future. This tortured man at the opening of Christ in Concrete initiates a tale of rage at the injustices perpetrated by big business on the underpaid, underprotected, and underrespected immigrant workers of the early 20th century. From the moment of Geremio’s death, the humiliation and destruction of his family is sealed. Di Donato, fictionalizing only slightly events from his own childhood, details the promises made to his immigrant family, particularly by the American company that employed the father.

The story is told by Geremio’s oldest son, Paul. Paul’s parents hope that Paul will become a real American and acquire the advantages they never had: Paul attends school, and he hopes to become a radio operator. With his father’s death, however, the dreams for Paul evaporate. Even though he is barely 12, he must now be the man, the father. So Paul sets out to be a bricklayer, just as he would have done in the Old Country. Despite his youth, his father’s co-workers help him to keep up with the older men, especially after the resultant hearing on the worksite death: The committee blames Geremio, thereby allowing Boss Murdin to escape any fines or payments to Geremio’s family. Paul searches for help as his family’s burdens grow: His mother gives birth to his seventh sibling, his uncle breaks his leg and can now only work with the women doing sweatshop piecework at home.

Paul looks to the Catholic Church to help his family in their profound hunger, but he finds only a self-interested priest who stuffs his face as he spouts clichés about God providing for those in need. Di Donato presents Catholicism, and its ties to Italian family customs, as the center of the lives of the working poor, who manage to derive joy in their impoverished lives and talk themselves through tragedies. Di Donato’s point is clear: In America the church is no help, and the only solace derives from the family itself, as it attempts to aid and heal. For Di Donato, the only god in America is the one that Geremio calls God Job. Job is what offers the immigrants their fragile chances at American success: a house and money. Job is also the god who continually crucifies those who are most supplicating and vulnerable before him. By redefining God as the American middle-class work ethic, the author suggests that the true religion of America is Protestantism, especially as it deals out tough pragmatism and individuals-only salvations.

The novel closes with Paul spiritually and physically breaking the heart of his faithful mother, Annunziata, by renouncing his belief in God. Annunziata, who has given life and love to her children (even as she has had to sacrifice Paul’s childhood in order to feed them all), cannot accept the American god, who says that “too many” children are not gifts, but self-indulgence and lack of self-control. Distrusting both Catholicism and Protestantism, Paul sees nothing in either the Italian or American God. His mother collapses and dies as he insists on his own truth and his own bitterness.

Christ in Concrete distinguishes itself as a working-class novel, with such common features as the alienation of work, the brutality of corporations and the wealthy, and its view of religion as complicit in the weakening and demonizing of working-class people. The novel is also distinguished in the features it eschews: rejecting the “happy ending” cliché, it refuses to focus on Paul as an exceptional child who must “escape” the burden of his family and his class through education and self-advancement. Paul remains with his family and class, who need him, and within him his unrequited rage continues to smolder.

Source

Di Donato, Pietro. Christ in Concrete. New York: Signet Classic, 1993.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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