By Victor Greto
When Christopher Castellani researched and wrote his first novel, “A Kiss From Maddalena,” about a young girl’s experiences in a small village in Italy during World War II, he kept returning to the source of the inspiration for both his book and his life.
“I constantly called my mother and father and asked questions for the detail that I couldn’t find any other way,” said Castellani, a Wilmington native and author of two novels detailing the Italian-American experience, including his second novel, “The Saint of Lost Things,” which takes place in Wilmington’s Little Italy.
His parents, Vincent and Lidia Castellani, still live in Wilmington. They emigrated from Italy soon after World War II.
“There were so many little things,” the 36-year-old author says. “I learned they used fireplace ashes to wash the laundry. Who would have known that? And she told me about how she had to get up early to walk to the spring and get the water for the day.”
Mom liked it so much, Castellani said, that she has the book on tape “on constant loop, and listens to it over and over again.”
Castellani is artistic director and interim executive director at Grub Street, a non-profit creative writing center that nurtures writers in Boston.
By the time Castellani was born in Wilmington in 1972, his parents and two older siblings had left Little Italy and moved near Prices Corner.
His parents had waited 14 years between Christopher’s birth and those of his next oldest sibling.
“Because I was the youngest child and my brother and sister were out of the house, my first and best friends were my parents,” he said. “They would tell me stories all the time and I felt that was my childhood.”
When he wrote his two novels, which include aspects of his parents’ childhoods, their coming of age, and early marriage struggles, he felt like he was writing about his own childhood.
“It’s a way of getting back to figuring out my past,” he said, “exploring who I am and where I came from.”
Castellani was a natural writer, and loved books.
He went to high school at Salesianum, earned a B.A. in English at Swarthmore College, and pursued a PhD at Tufts University near Boston.
“I wanted to be an English professor,” Castellani said, and studied 19th-century American literature.
Although he finished his classes at Tufts, before working on his dissertation, he took a year off to earn a Masters degree in creative writing at Boston University.
“I wrote for a year, and then I had 100 pages of a novel, so I decided to continue the novel,” he said. He never wrote his dissertation.
Castellani views literature and the novel through a traditional lens.
“I like 19th-century and early 20th-century American and British novels,” he said. “Lots of characters, a linear story, no bells and whistles. I’m interested in families and marriages, which is what those novels stress.”
His novels are distinctly traditional. Although he occasionally slides in and out of the future and the past in his two books, they read as if they belong to the times in which they’re set. “A Kiss From Maddelena” is set during World War II Italy. “The Saint of Lost Things” takes place in Wilmington’s Little Italy during 1954-1955.
Despite his themes of immigration and family and his Italian heritage, his books are consistently and engagingly unsentimental.
“One of my major goals was not to write a sentimental story about Italians who fall in love and have big happy dinners, or that there would be Mafia ties,” he said.
If Maddalena is based on his mother Lidia, Antonio, the man who comes to America with his family, and then returns to the Italian village to scoop up a wife, is based on Castellani’s father Vincent.
But there are major differences.
“Part of the pleasure of writing the book was to imagine what might have been,” Castellani said. “That’s the pleasure of fiction, the ability to show different paths and different lives.”
He says that much of his second book, about Antonio and Maddalena’s experience in postwar Wilmington, is a love letter to his father, who worked at steady jobs but never pursued his dream of opening a restaurant.
Although Antonio fulfills that dream by the end of the novel, there is nothing glamorous in his character. He is the man who takes Maddalena away from the village she loves and a boy that she had fallen in love with. Antonio struggles with both himself and his wife, who only warms to him over time.
Antonio also joins a couple of others when they abuse the home of an African-American family that has moved into that the ten-block neighborhood of row homes and shops surrounding St. Anthony’s Church.
“Italians are known as people who love everyone,” Castellani said. “There is a social component of Italian culture that is accepting and loving life, but there’s also a real strong discomfort with African-Americans, especially in Wilmington where they were fighting for the same territory. I couldn’t write about this time without dealing with that. I thought it would be dishonest.”
Each of the characters hold varying degrees of prejudice. There are no white knights in these books. The characters are human.
Castellani’s main goal, however, particularly in “The Saint of Lost Things,” was “to show the hard work of a marriage that didn’t begin in the best of circumstance,” he said.
Even the love story between the teenagers presented in the first novel is as unsentimental and real as it gets in a traditionally-written novel. The Italian boy, Vito, who loves Maddalena, does not get the girl the reader believes he richly deserves.
And after that novel ends, the boy does not return in the second novel.
“The love story can be a different part of someone’s life and it’s over,” Castellani said. “It’s kind of anti-romantic that way. I thought of them as a young love, and that’s different to me from a marriage.”
With marriage, you create a family, he said. You learn to love whom you marry through common struggles and experiences.
“As a novelist, I can show how that happens,” he said.