Fascist Adolescent

THE RED CARNATION (244 pp.)--Elio Vittorini--New Directions ($3).

The critics are pretty much agreed that Elio Vittorini is a novelist to reckon with. In Sicily and The Twilight of the Elephant even brought him a plug from Ernest Hemingway: "One of the very best of the new Italian writers." His U.S. publishers believe that The Red Carnation, too, is "a fine example of Italy's incredible literary renaissance." But pinning down just what is good in Vittorini's novels takes a little more saying.

To most readers, The Red Carnation will seem to be simply a tale of adolescent love, writ in neon. Hero Mainardi is a 16-year-old schoolboy who falls in love with a girl student. She gives him a red carnation. But on visiting the local brothel, Mainardi promptly loses both his unstable heart and his symbolic carnation to a prostitute. In her, Mainardi sees all his boyish dreams of confident maturity come true; she sees in him the innocence and naturalness that she has lost.

This is one of the oldest stories in the world, and Author Vittorini, like most of those who have retold it, has failed to avoid seamy sentimentality. His prostitute, aflame with love on one burner and cooking up illicit narcotic deals on the other, seems to Mainardi to be "The Madonna on Horseback"; but to the reader she is just a pipe dream. When the cops put her away at the end of the book, it is no more poignant than a decision by the gas company to lock up the meter.

Where Vittorini excels is in matters that are more real than romantic. He brings to life the hostel in which Mainardi and his fellow boarders eat, sleep, gossip, quarrel, and exchange adolescent dogma on everything from Homer to modern politics. He gets down pat the earnest remarks that bubble from sophomoric lips ("I absolutely agree with the ancient Greeks"). He knows how hard it is for any boy to keep a secret, and how the fears and fond hopes of a father and mother cling like leeches to a boy's guilty skin. He knows just how rumor rules adolescent whims and how instinctive is the yearning for gangs, pledges and mysterious cabals.

He shows, too, and convincingly, that for Mainardi to have been a young Fascist was the most natural thing in the world, especially after Mussolini gave him a dramatic black shirt and a shiny pistol. Adolescent it all was--except perhaps for the otherwise respectable adults who were leading the way or cheering the Mainardis from the sidelines.

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