The Music of the Inferno (SUNY series in Italian/American Culture) - Hardcover

"The novel as a form still lives in our culture because it continues to be the deepest and most rewarding guide to the mystery of people's souls, and this brave and honest novel serves precisely that standard." -- Don DeLillo, author of Underworld

"This unmetaphorical tour of the underworld plunges into the deep history and foundational crimes of the little city of Utica, New York. It is Lentricchia's most ambitious narrative to date, a confrontation with class and race which also offers the pleasures of magnificent sentences, loathsome objects and events, and grotesque as well as enigmatic characters. The Music of the Inferno does the historical novel in a new way, and that is no mean feat." -- Fredric Jameson

"This beautifully written novel is not just about Italians or others in Utica. Like Faulkner or Joyce, Lentricchia has staked out a small piece of territory from which, implicitly, he can generalize. The part stands for the whole here, in so many ways. Lentricchia's novel frames the American experience in ways that, for me, were revelatory. It is a brilliant piece of fiction, able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best writing in America today."-- Jay Parini, author of Benjamin's Crossing

Returning to his hometown of Utica, New York, at age sixty, Robert Tagliaferro begins a quest to find his identity