Household Saints by Francine Prose

First published: 1981

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Fable

Time of work: 1949 to the late 1960’s

Locale: New York City

Principal Characters:

• Joseph Santangelo, a butcher with a thriving business on Mulberry Street
• Mrs. Santangelo, Joseph’s mother, who makes the sausage from a secret recipe
• Catherine Falconetti, a woman who marries Joseph as a result of her father’s losing a bet in a pinochle game
• Theresa Santangelo, the daughter of Catherine and Joseph, who is preoccupied with religion
• Augie Santangelo, Joseph’s brother, who sold his share of the butcher shop
• Lino Falconetti, Catherine’s father, the owner of a radio repair shop
• Nicky Falconetti, the son of Lino and the brother of Catherine

Form and Content

Combining ribald humor and extravagant mythos, Francine Prose tells a story about two Italian American families and makes them emblematic of the entire community of Little Italy. The novel is an attempt to reveal how religious beliefs and chance happenings determine a family’s destiny.

Household Saints opens in the midst of a heat wave so severe as to cause the people in the neighborhood to eschew meat as part of their diet; thus for the period of the heat wave, Joseph Santangelo’s business at the butcher shop is as bad as Lino Falconetti’s radio repair shop is all the time. Not having much to do, the men while away time by playing pinochle. On one fateful evening, Joseph opens his refrigerator and a blast of cold air hits the men. When Joseph closes the door, Lino asks him to open it again, but Joseph refuses. The argument is settled by a bet—Lino’s daughter against an open refrigerator door. Joseph wins and decides to claim Catherine for his wife. Catherine’s acceptance of Joseph’s proposal is a manifestation of her naïveté that has been nurtured by a steady diet of Hollywood films. For Catherine, Joseph is a kind of Humphrey Bogart, which must make her a kind of Lauren Bacall.

Mrs. Santangelo is not so accepting. She calls immediately upon Saint Gennaro, whom she believes to be her patron saint, to explain what Joseph could possibly see in Catherine. A statue of Gennaro occupies a prominent place on Mrs. Santangelo’s altar, which takes up most of the family’s mantelpiece. Next to Gennaro is a plaster Madonna and a photo of Mrs. Santangelo’s late husband, Zio, who after his death is, Mrs. Santangelo believes, a frequent visitor.

At her marriage, Catherine, slightly tipsy from Champagne, thinks of her wedding overladen with food and drink as being similar to the marriage at Cana where Jesus is said to have changed water into wine. In Household Saints, miracles line up one after the other—some holy, some secular. Saint Gennaro holds back a volcano with his arms; Joseph opens Catherine with his thumb, which Catherine also thinks of as a miracle.

The power struggle that develops between Catherine and Mrs. Santangelo after the marriage becomes overt when Catherine brings African violets to Joseph’s apartment and puts one next to Saint Gennaro. Though Mrs. Santangelo objects, Catherine wins the day; she wins the day again when, pregnant, she determines that she will help Joseph in the shop rather than take up housewifely duties. Mrs. Santangelo has other weapons, however, especially the power of prophecy, and when Catherine watches Joseph kill turkeys Mrs. Santangelo says that her baby will look like a chicken. Prophecy is strong, and Catherine’s firstborn dies. Yet the young eventually win out over the old, and after a period of mourning the loss of her powers, Mrs. Santangelo dies.

Theresa’s birth, the result of a second conception, takes place in almost exactly the midway point in the novel, and thereafter she becomes its focus, with Catherine and Joseph reacting to Theresa’s turns and moves. Despite Catherine’s best intentions to rear Theresa as a modern American child, somehow Mrs. Santangelo’s influences seem dominant and Theresa turns out to be more religious even than Mrs. Santangelo. From the time that Theresa is old enough to go to school, she wants to go to parochial school, wants to be a nun, and desires to cultivate the saints. Despite her parents’ efforts to turn her in different directions, Theresa pursues her calling much like a monomaniac.

Since her parents refuse to allow her to enter a convent and be a nun, Theresa latches on to the next best thing: She will be a saint like Saint Therese, the little flower, whose life was a testimony to modesty, humility, and service in the form of mundane and menial tasks. Theresa’s sexual liaison with Leonard comforts her mother, who has been looking for some signs of normalcy in her daughter, and acts as the focal point for Theresa’s breakdown. One day, Leonard returns to his apartment to find that Theresa has been ironing one red-and-white-checked shirt for eight hours. Theresa insists that there are many checked shirts and that Joseph has provided them as he has the loaves and fishes. Moreover, Jesus has been there with her and has thanked her for taking care of one of his flock.

Theresa does not recover, and soon after her death rumors start that all the patients at the hospital recovered immediately once she was dead, the patients and their relatives declaring that the hospital flowers had healing powers. The community also declares that since his daughter’s death, Joseph never cheated customers again. This last statement, at least, is false, since Joseph begins to cheat more and more, and the women tolerate it as they have before. Soon people take sides about the consequences of Theresa’s life. Only the elderly take the story as relevant to a saint’s life. They shush one another and listen to the sound of the cards, for they believe that with that sound God is sending a saint.

Context

The women’s issues that underlie Household Saints are related to a past time and place. The novel is set in New York City in September, 1949, four years after the end of World War II, a war that brought about a change in social mores lasting until the rise of the women’s movement in the 1970’s. The culture that arose after World War II called for single-family housing and a new kind of menu, typified in Household Saints by Augie and his wife’s taste for white bread and bologna, which he offers as a substitute for Joseph’s sausage. Augie sells his part of the butcher shop to Joseph, moves away from Little Italy, eschews Old World habits, and like most other Americans, buys into the new American culture.

Otherwise, life in the Italian community from the 1950’s until 1966 is unchanged. The community lives untouched, it appears, by the outside world. No references are made to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the rise of the Black Power movement, much less to early attempts to define a new role for women. Children live in the same large apartments with their parents and then support their parents when the parents get older. Joseph cares for his mother in the way that she once cared for him. When he marries, Joseph brings Catherine into the house that is ruled by his mother, and Catherine adjusts to it, gradually making the changes that she believes are important. Power struggles develop, but they do not break up the families; divorces are forbidden in Catholicism. In the family, a man’s role is that of breadwinner and arbitrator; a woman’s role is that of wife and mother.

Left without a wife, Lino Falconetti expects his daughter to do the necessary cooking and cleaning; his son, Nicky, “works” with his father, though he is incompetent. In addition, Nicky accompanies his father to the men’s pinochle games. The men understand that a newly married man will spend less time playing pinochle, but they also expect that in due time a wife will be pregnant and will turn the husband out of her bed for a given period. In addition, as women get older husbands spend less time at home, preferring the company of men. For the most part, women’s social lives are limited to occasional outings with their husbands and daily trips to the market, where they meet other women like themselves. With few exceptions, a man and woman will marry at the appropriate time, have children, make do with each other, provide for older relatives, and die, mostly in their own beds. In Household Saints, there are few exceptions. One is Nicky, who kills himself in despair; others are priests or nuns, whose way of life is an acceptable alternative.

Bibliography

Booklist. LXXVII, June 1, 1981, p. 1292.

Hogan, Randolph. “The Butcher Won a Wife.” The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1981, 12. Hogan’s review is a critique of the novel. Lavish in his praise, he points out that in only a few pages, Prose is able to establish most of the elements that will form the pattern that dictates the direction of the lives of her characters, as well as the structure of the novel itself. Hogan makes more of the bad luck of the Falconettis than other reviewers do.

Kirkus Reviews. Review of Household Saints. 49 (April 15, 1981): 529. Calls the novel a folk-mystical/quasi-comedic tale, claiming that the characters in the novel are so well drawn that a reader accepts the miracles and the initial assumption—that even God tilts the scales and cheats at some gigantic pinochle game that affects the lives of people, in this case Joseph and his family and friends.

Nerboso, Donna L. Review of Household Saints. Literary Journal, June 1, 1981, 1244. Nerboso points to Prose’s major achievement: the writing of a narrative rich in detail that meshes the ordinary and the extraordinary, the natural and the supernatural, and thus moves the characters from the commonplace to the mystic.

Publishers Weekly. CCIX, May 8, 1981, p. 247.

Strouse, Jean. “Sausages and Saints.” Newsweek 98, no. 5 (August 3, 1981): 72. Strouse admires the novel’s striking style, incisive characterization, texture in the details of setting and character, and impressive and illuminating meshing of madness and grace. Each of the characters is troubled with some aspect of the supernal, from Joseph’s lucky thumb to Catherine’s miraculous knowledge of Carmela’s recipe for the sausage; from Nicky’s obsession with Madame Butterfly to Carmela’s sightings of her dead husband.