The End by Salvatore Scibona review

By Alfred Hickling

After working on it for a decade, Scibona finished his debut in time to be included in the New Yorker's list of 20 fiction writers under 40. Centred around an Italian community in Ohio in the 1950s, it chiefly concerns the travails of Rocco, a forlorn baker whose son has died in a Korean PoW camp and whose wife, the excruciatingly named Loveypants, has left him. Scibona has a facility for unexpected metaphor: loaves rising on proofing shelves are likened to "a mausoleum of innocents" while an experienced abortionist employs "empathy as another shiny tool, like the speculum, for opening up and evacuating". Yet Scibona seems to be in pursuit of the perfect sentence rather than an engaging story: his characters do not give up smoking but "cigarettes forbade themselves"; no one simply absconds if they can "absquatulate". The baker's Job-like forbearance becomes trying after a while: "This is the tale of a man whose bucket leaked on the way home from the well," though judging from the density of the prose, it's a very slow leak.


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