‘Via Roma’ by Mary Melfi

Reviewed by Carmelo Militano

Mary Melfi’s writing career goes all the way back to the mid-seventies, with the publication of her first collection of poetry The Dance, the Cage, and the Horse, in 1976. It is a vast and varied career encompassing many genres: poetry, plays, memoir, and two novels: Infertility Rites (Guernica, 1991) and most recently another one, Via Roma. She is no doubt part of the multicultural canon in Canada, or at the very least has a secure niche in Italo-Canadian letters.

Via Roma is a novel driven by the main character Sophie Wolfe and sets out to be philosophically wise, witty, and alternating between lustful lament, celebration, and tragic undertow, and finally a meditation on life versus the after-life.

Since this is a novel set in Montreal, the use of the last name Wolfe by Melfi quickly establishes an ironic tone, as anyone with a basic knowledge of Canadian history would recognize. Then there is the choice of of the name Sophie—the familiar of Sophia— which in Greek means wisdom. Her name almost neatly summarizes what this novel is all about or at least points us towards the journey Melfi is about to take us on. It is an exuberant ride full of saucy comments on the joys of kissing and orgasm, for example, and on the eternal joys of the marriage bed in the Eternal city of Rome, as well as the horrible loss Sophie feels at the unexpected death of her wonderful Italian–Canadian husband.

Dante Aglieri (another not-so-subtle reference), who is the epitome of virtue, gentleness, and over-all a great lover. To the joy and surprise of Sophie, he loves to give her oral sex, is smart and grounded, and not connected to the Montreal mafia. Or is he in fact ‘connected’?  What is the truth about his death in a mysterious car ‘accident’?

What is refreshing about this novel is Melfi’s use of an Anglo character to talk about things Italian. In other words, Melfi uses an outsider to show or give us an insider (Italian) account. Sophie provides us with her tart observations about the Italian family she has married into, ethnic divisions and strains in Montreal, and her dodgy and complicated relationship with her media star mother, Sandra.  She is also fixated on romantic love, physical love and how it leads to spiritual or divine love; she is preoccupied with its connection to the divine in contrast to the base free-wheeling attitudes (and behaviour) of her promiscuous mother. Sophie repeatedly makes arch remarks about her mother’s sex life and career. You see Sophie is all virtue in contrast to her mother, and if there is a failing in her character it is this one-dimenonsal note Melfi sounds over and over again about Sophie. Her husband is perfection personified, Sophie herself is a free-spirit, liberated, smart and cute in her saucy irreverent attitude towards everyone’s dirty secret-sex: you see Anglos love sex with Italians and now alas he is gone.

On the other hand, Italians would call Sophie ‘spiritoso,’ witty, and we are asked to see her as liberated and bold in her understanding of sexual relations between men and women, and in her desire to defy convention, and aspire towards and find a ‘higher’ love which she has been denied with the death of her husband.

The problem, however, is that although her philosophical reach is meant to show us how Sophie is literally searching for wisdom, her philosophical rambles instead convey the feeling she is not as clever as she thinks she is and her ideas feel like pop psychology. Sophie’s need to be philosophical gets in the way of her own story and inquiry about what happened to her husband.

Melfi wants Via Roma to be both a funny romantic romp and a deeply felt existential examination of love, sex, and marriage. It is written with a frothy style and has Sophie espouse ideas on God, life, death, Italy, sex, food, language- to name a few- and it is also a novel that wants to show us what a true lusty contemporary young woman thinks and feels.

Sophie is a seeker on a quest to learn who killed her beloved husband, and to find him in the after-life or alternative spirit world.  Her guide is a Virgil-like character who, as in the original Divine Comedy, takes Sophie on a kind of magical mystery tour in the after life. She urgently, desperately wants to find him, see him, and make love with him. Along the way there is much philosophical talk of one kind or another on, for example, the nature of the after life, the nature of spiritual or divine love, and there are many travelogue-like commentaries about life in Italy.

Near the end of the novel Sophie swoons in delicious desire ‘one kiss and my spirits are up- up and away. Kisses have wings. Two tongues meet and it’s glorious and hot with meaning.’ The novel consistently celebrates passion and frames desire and longing into a lover’s discourse only to arrive in the harbour of unexpected motherhood. In a sense Via Roma ends up becoming (pardon the pun) what it set out not to be: a conventional novel with a cheeky narrator.

It is a tragic-comic novel full of the ups and downs, torments and pleasures of  love found and lost, and found again in the birth of a child.

Guernica | 218 pages | $20.00 | paper | ISBN 978-1771830140