Paesano with a Trowel

THREE CIRCLES OF LIGHT (246 pp.) --Piefro d! Donato--Julian Messner ($3.95).

As Pietro di Donato sees it, writing and bricklaying have a lot in common: "Your bread is not adulterated, not taken from another. You are creating something that will be here when your vegetable self has departed." In 1939, after Bricklayer di Donato turned to writing and his autobiographical Christ in Concrete became a bestseller, success paradoxically robbed him of both crafts: "I became too sophisticated for bricklaying and too confused to write."

Di Donato was a conscientious objector in World War II, eventually settled with his wife on Long Island in a white, wooden colonial house ("I was so sick of brick") and tried to overcome his writer's block. By 1958 he managed to publish a sex potboiler, This Woman. In his latest novel, he shows himself thoroughly unblocked. Revisiting the scene of his first book--the Italian colony of West Hoboken, N.J.--he has written a piece of immigrant Americana that has no more narrative line than an antipasto, but glints with passion and pathos, cruelty and laughter. Set in the World War I era, it is a Saroyanesque merry-go-round spinning to minor-key music.

End of Boyhood. One of his heroes is flame-bearded Uncle Barbarossa, a dynamiter by trade who in off-hours spouts revolutionary speeches at his aged beagle Garibaldi. When the time comes for the ailing dog to be destroyed. Uncle Barbarossa is determined that "General Gari baldi shall not die a bourgeois death" but exit gloriously in an explosive blast. He corsets the dog with two sticks of dynamite, buries him in a snowbank and lights the fuses. But faithful Garibaldi lopes after his master, and half of West Hoboken scrambles for dear life. The animal goes out with a bang, all right, but so does a neighbor's entire house front.

This blend of animal anguish and animal high spirits sets the tone for the whole story, as seen through the eyes of Paolino di Alba, a precocious 13-year-old. To Paolino, poverty is spelled ATLAS and HERCULES, the words on the cement bags his mother uses for diapers. Mama is patient, pious, and always pregnant. Papa is a bricklayer and a sport who feels a cut above the other paesanos. He flaunts a blonde, green-eyed "American" mistress named Delia with whom he wins dance contests at the local vaudeville palace.

Inevitably, Paolino receives his own sexual initiation in the embrace of a simmering charmer named Stella L'Afri-cana, whose North African blood gives her skin the green-bronze hue of lava.

Sex is a pagan appetite in Author di Donato's book and no more sinful than salami. However, Mama does break up Papa's affair when Delia goes so far as to have a child by him. Mama's triumph is brief; short weeks later, Papa is pinned to death under a collapsing wall. As the keening women cluster about the open coffin, Paolino seems to hear in their voices a lament for his dead boyhood.

Dream of Faust. Author di Donato's boyhood died in the same untimely way; at 14 he picked up his own father's trowel and proceeded to support his seven brothers and sisters. Out of such memories, he draws a near-religious mysticism about labor and life. After a decade of "the hell of unbelief," Di Donato, 49, is enjoying a kind of religious reconversion, has completed a biography of Mother Cabrini, and is currently at work on a biography of St. Maria Goretti. But he explains: "Catholicism of today doesn't reach me. Mine is a primitive, quasi-pagan religion."

That religion, whatever its nature, may produce some work a long way from Hoboken or bricklaying. Says he: "I want to write a modern Faust in which Faust is a physicist. The theme has incalculable meaning for our times. We have bartered our souls for everything Faust wants. I want to do for today's world what Dante did for the Catholic world. In my Faust, Eisenhower will visit the Inferno and meet the Rosen bergs. Truman will see thousands of mutilated Japanese babies."

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