Bricklayer

CHRIST IN CONCRETE -- Pietro di Donato--Bobbs-Merrill ($2.50).

This is the precocious first novel of a precocious bricklayer. Born 28 years ago in the slums of West Hoboken, N. J., handsome Pietro di Donato was 14 when his father was killed in a construction accident, leaving a widow and eight children. Pietro, a "bricklayer in diapers," took up his father's bricklaying trowel, has supported his family ever since. In his off-hours he read everything in sight, especially Russian novels.

Christ in Concrete, autobiographical but imaginative, is a passionate, humorous, pathetic story of peasant Italians in the U. S., at work, in tenements, in animal anguish and animal high spirits. Author di Donato's Italians speak a translated Italian, lyrical, bawdy, tender, crude.

Three scenes stand out as among the most dramatic in recent fiction: the collapse of a jerry-built building in which Paul's father is slowly drowned in concrete; an accident in which Paul's godfather plunges 20 floors from a skyscraper scaffolding; an all-night Italian wedding fiesta, a triumph of descriptive gusto over disgust.

With so much to recommend it, Christ in Concrete has one unfortunate fault--its occasional passages of impressionistic, Joycean rhetoric. But these passages are not structural. Without them, the book would be as solid as one of Author di Donato's brick walls.

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