In a Glass House

Hugh Oliver is editor-in-chief at the OISE Press.

In a Glass House is the second novel in Ricci’s still-to-be completed
trilogy; the first, Lives of the Saints (1990), won the Governor
General’s Award for fiction. This novel begins with the arrival in
Canada of an Italian family comprising 7-year-old Vittorio, his father,
and his baby half-sister, whose illegitimate birth led to the disgrace
and death of his mother. Spanning the early 1960s to the early 1980s and
set mainly in an Ontario rural community near Windsor, the novel
recounts Vittorio’s experiences of childhood, of going to school and
then to university, his three-year stint as an English teacher in
Nigeria, and his return to the farm following the death of his father.

At the core of the novel is Vittorio’s self-protective and painful
need to distance himself from any kind of emotional attachment—to his
morose and lonely father; to his extended Italian family of uncles,
aunts, and cousins; to his peers at school and university; and to his
unwanted half-sister, who is soon adopted by a local WASP family. The
perspective offered by Vittorio as the first-person narrator is mostly
one of unremitting gloom. Linked with every positive thought or action
is an invariable qualifying “but” or souring paradox: “All along
we’d seemed caught in this tension between initiative and retreat.”

Ultimately, the strength of this novel lies as much in its exquisite
prose as it does in the author’s insight into the human condition,
particularly into the loneliness and pain of the sensitive and
intelligent outsider. Ricci’s final novel in the trilogy is eagerly
awaited; we can only hope it brings some positive resolution.