Novelist relies on imagination, not his own life experience

Salvatore Scibona's Italian heritage has become a forceful background for his writing.

Living in Provincetown, Mass., a noted hangout for writers, he administers the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center. This summer he is teaching a class in the novel at Harvard.

But the foremost event of his young life, a little more than three decades, is the publication of his debut novel, "The End," which has been hailed by a number of critics as a work worthy of Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and James Joyce.

Pretty heady stuff for a young guy on his way up.

Scibona is hesitant to accept such august compliments. In a phone interview from Boston, Scibona admitted to having never read Graham Greene but does have enormous admiration for the other novelists with whom he has been compared. He especially admires Bellow, but all of Bellow's characters are intellectuals, he said, and none of his are. "So, I had to find a way of engaging the metaphysical things in my characters' minds in a way that is true to them."

For his characters in "The End," he has tried to "find a voice that is sort of borrowed from Rocco (one of Scibona's characters) but retains the perspective of an omniscient narrator," Scibona said.

It took 10 careful years for Scibona to finish "The End." He wrote every day, spent a year doing research in Italy and dreamed of a book that would involve the reader in that world as if he lived in it. "The beginning was just the smallest germ of detail — someone walking up a staircase — nothing else."

After writing for five to six years, Scibona had six to seven characters in a milieu, "but what was happening was bogus. The only thing that was true were the characters. Over the years, I systematically changed the whole book except for the characters. It was a wholesale change of the character of the book itself."

According to Scibona, who writes in longhand rather than using a computer, he wrote as many as 100 pages a year, but kept throwing the oldest pages away. "Some people put throw-away novels in a drawer. I always had at least 200 pages, but thousands of pages ended up in the trash. I wouldn't want to go through that process again."

The book focuses on the state of Ohio on Aug. 15, 1953, but jumps around in time as it treats four main characters, an elderly abortionist, a teenage boy, a drapery seamstress and a jeweler, all possessing an odd connection with a crime that changes their lives. Much of the narrative concerns immigration, broken loyalties and racial hostility.