Book review: Twisted Head

I’m on another book review kick, thanks in part to Amazon’s Vine program–they send me books to read, and I get to review them. Looking at the selection, I’ve got to say that Theodore Sturgeon probably had it right–there weren’t that many that I’d want to read. But I picked a few of the more promising ones and a few days later had some new additions for my library.

I’ve got a few more in the pipeline, so expect to see some more.

Carl Capotorto. Twisted Head: An Italian American Memoir. New York: Broadway Books, 2008. 255 pp.

This book has one of the best titles I’ve seen in a while, and it’s completely accurate–the author’s last name means “twisted head” in Italian. Capotorto grew up in the 1960s/1970s Bronx with a controlling father, acquiescent mother, and three sisters. For a while, the family owns a small restaurant, and this is where the book is at its best. Indeed, looking at the cover, you’d think this was the center of the narrative. Maybe it should be: Cappi’s Restaurant is an upside-down corner of the Bronx where customers can’t ever eat slices of pizza at a table (they must instead go to the counter) and have to follow Capotorto senior’s strange rules. At times, he even demands they view and evaluate hard-core fetish pornography in the name of his decency campaign. Capotorto junior does a brilliant job of depicting the place as an anti-restaurant, a place designed to drive any sane diner away.

This is really the most interesting part of the story–the restaurant and its customers contrasted with Cappi’s iron, sometimes misguided discipline and the family’s challenges. Once Cappi sells the restaurant, though, the book looses some of its charm. As the author gets older, the emphasis shifts to his own confusion about his sexuality and his continuing struggle against his father as an extended home “improvement” project makes him a joyless, unwilling conscript in his father’s carpentry brigade.

The highlights of Twisted Head are the author’s earliest years, when his father is ruling the roost at the restaurant. There’s a sense that as bizarre as it all is, it’s completely normal for Carl, because it’s all he’s known. Once he gets older and more worldly, we lose that feeling, and it’s just another teenager who doesn’t get along with his dad.