[In the following review, Deasy dismisses Three Circles of Light as “a cliché-ridden, overdone piece of hokum.”]

Twenty-one years ago Pietro Di Donato wrote a best-seller, largely autobiographical, about a West Hoboken Italian bricklayer and his family, entitled Christ in Concrete. In Three Circles of Light, he returns to the same scene and the same family, but to a time period about ten years earlier than that of the first novel, to the years, that is, immediately before and immediately after World War I. Paolino di Alba, the youngster protagonist of the present novel, is the Paul, the central character of Christ in Concrete. The death of Geremio, Paul's father, so searingly described in the opening of Christ in Concrete, is the closing episode of Three Circles of Light.

A loose collection of episodes rather than a sustained narrative, Three Circles of Light nevertheless gives promise in its early pages of effecting a genuine evocation of a tenement childhood in a crowded polyglot neighborhood, all the shapes, sounds, and colors surrounding a tree growing in West Hoboken, now Union City. But the promise dies a-borning and the novel's descent into sentimentality, bathos, and just plain scurrility is rapid. The nadir is reached in the concluding chapters in the goings-on at Geremio's bier.

Of characterization in any true novelistic sense Three Circles of Light has none. It has only “characters” who are either caricatures or stereotypes. There are also a couple of grotesques, La Smorfia and Maria La Virgine, weird sisters who dominate one of the chapters, a revolting fantasy describing how the San Rocco parish was saved from the influenza plague of 1918. Much of what attempts to pass for humor in Three Circles of Light can only be said to be in execrably bad taste. The dialogue for the most part is in that phony Biblical idiom that purports to be a translation of the speakers' Italian, a device that was lyrically effective in Christ in Concrete, but here is only exasperatingly cloying. When Mr. Di Donato tries for a straightforward purple passage there is only flat stuff like the following: “Then Stella and I would leave the farm [they're on an outing in Saugerties] and wander the pathways and slopes and valleys of the pretty hills, discovering brooks and streams, and the animal life of field and sky, and walk in the silent, cathedral halls of a forest of giant pines that shaded out the hot sun.”

Stella L'Africano is the stereotype sex-pot of Three Circles of Light, the child bride of a sixty-year-old named Sebastiano. When the Saugerties idyll takes place she, age twenty, is having a love affair with Paolino, age fourteen. “I longed,” says the passionate boy, “to bury my face in the humid fragrance of her armpits.” He does; and more. Three Circles of Light also features a Jesuit, Don Pietro of the San Rocco parish, who is oddly deficient in catechism: “Next Sunday Don Pietro ascended the pulpit. ‘Commandment Seven,’ he announced. … ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’” Presumably the paisanos of San Rocco's ended their Our Fathers with, “For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.”

Mr. Di Donato is on record as saying that for many years after the success of Christ in Concrete he was too confused to write. That confusion must indeed be worse confounded if he is now unaware that in Three Circles of Light he has put together a cliché-ridden, overdone piece of hokum.