In the Name of the Father (novel)

A novel deeply in the American grain that tells the story of the funny and painful transit to manhood accomplished (and endured) by Tonto Schwartz.

While young Tonto moves forward through successive rites of passage the psychological direction of the novel is backward in time as he struggles to understand the father he never knew.

Tony Ardizzone's first novel (the author is 29) is dense with particular details of Tonto's world—the texture of his Catholic education, the character and qualities of his young cronies, the sociology of his tough North Side neighborhood, his love life and the marginal but mostly contented lives of his mother and aunt.

Tonto's confusion about his place in the world—he drops in and out of college, takes a production-line job in a factory, dates and is hurt by classy girls, loses some teeth at the 1968 Democratic Convention—is of a piece with his striving for an impossible metamorphic reunion and reconciliation with his father.

"-Jane Larkin Crain of New York Times Book Review "Growing up poor and Catholic in the Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s, Tonto Schwartz, son of an Irish-Catholic mother and a Jewish veteran, goes through schooling with the nuns, friendship, sexual encounters, drinking, and an abortive sojourn in college.