World of His Fathers : UNTO THE SONS, <i> By Gay Talese (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 633 pp.)</i>

Five hundred years ago this October the first Italian sailed to America and wrote his name into history. Now comes Gay Talese to write the epic story of the discovery of America by one of the millions of Italian families, unknown to history, who centuries later followed that famous sailor across the Atlantic, forever changing their lives and the life of their newly adopted country.

In midst of the hoopla, films and rhetorical excesses that have already begun to surround the Columbian celebration, “Unto the Sons” poses a profound personal question: How did the immigrant experience, which has shaped every piece of this great American mosaic, affect the lives of one family and, ultimately, one American--the author himself?

The book is a people’s narrative, the story of ordinary men and women, backstage of history, who saddled the horses, transcribed the letters, cooked the meals, and, like the Taleses, tailored the clothes. The leaders and aristocrats of both countries come to grief; the people endure and even flourish. Like Talese’s other books--”The Kingdom and the Power,” “Honor Thy Father” and “Thy Neighbor’s Wife”--”Unto the Sons” is Biblical in title, ambition and length. It is an Old Testament account of people, their diaspora and the imprint of the fathers on the sons from generation to generation.

And like Columbus’ voyage, Talese’s story is punctuated by moments of wonder and discovery, which the author delivers with inspired description, shrewd insight into human nature, and a wisdom that illumines the great range of human experience that has shaped his family over several generations. “Unto the Sons” should be compared to Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers” and of course to “Roots,” but it also has much in common, particularly in its narrative digressions, with Jorge Amado’s later novels of the making of Brazil from its many immigrant roots.

But this voyage of family discovery, also like that of Columbus, seems to wander for long periods on a trackless ocean, leaving the reader lost in time and space and ready to mutiny. Digressions meander away, then return. Pedantic biographies of historical figures like Garibaldi stretch on for pages of small type, the writing uncharacteristically lifeless and wooden, as if the author had simply typed his note cards. Some supporting characters are dealt with in excruciating detail; others are all but ignored. Talese is too good a writer not to have a pattern in mind, but for much of the book that pattern is buried deep in the cloth.

When it tells the story of the Taleses, “Unto the Sons” can be magnificent and moving. Like every saga of the New World, it begins in the Old World, in the Taleses’ home village of Maida high in the mountains above the sea in the very south of Italy. Maida is the opposite of America: an insular culture, primitive and cyclical, shaped by war, earthquake, revolution, oppression and the Mafia--and by charms, superstitions and passionate bonds to saints and their relics. “Maida was a warm, bright place in the mountains where no one truly saw the sun. People wore black there when they had nothing to mourn. They mourned in advance. The most casual of compliments could be construed as a curse.”

Maida is a village on the pathway of any invader bent on using Italy as a ladder into Europe. Spartacus came through Maida; so did the ancient Greeks, the French and the British. In 1943 so did the Americans, fighting their way north from their foothold in Sicily. And in the Italian army--their enemies--were two brothers of Gay’s father Joseph, a tailor who had come to America from Maida in 1920.

Like so many immigrants, Joseph did not turn his back on his past. He settled in Ocean City, N.J., with the smell of the Atlantic always in the air, a reminder that Italy was just across the horizon. His only son Gay grew up a boy between cultures, an avid Yankee fan wanting to be liked and accepted in the outside world, yet devoted to his parents, feeling like “an orphan in custody of a couple whose way of life was strange and baffling.” When Gay tosses his father a baseball the father simply does not know what to do. The son has thrown him America; the father cannot catch it.

A fourth-generation tailor, Joseph made Gay his “miniature mannequin.” It was Gay’s destiny “to become the dutiful only son of an exacting tailor who presumed to possess the precise measure of my body and soul; and it was my unavoidable birthright to wear the customized clothes that reflected his taste, advertised his trade, and reaffirmed his talent with needle and thread.”

His father had a tailor’s passion for appearances, and to the outside world was the patriotic American, buyer of war bonds, supporter of our troops in Europe. Yet while young Gay lovingly built models of American fighter planes and bombers, his father--an “emotional double agent” desperately worried about his relatives and tortured by his divided loyalties--was praying nightly to his village’s patron saint. This atavistic praying Gay found most embarrassing of all the immigrant qualities that set his family apart.

An altercation between Joseph and a customer underscores that cultural gap and leads the author to some musings about the occupational melancholy of tailors (they sound strikingly like those of writers), which takes us back to a tailor’s shop in Italy in 1911. There a ruthless Mafia chieftain is about to arrive to claim his new suit of clothes, but an overzealous young apprentice of 7 has accidentally cut the trousers. The tailor’s bold solution to this crisis is one of the book’s many dramatic moments in tailoring, a field relatively untapped by other writers up to now.

The young apprentice who cut the trousers is Joseph, Gay’s father, and to understand his roots in Maida is to begin to understand why he and his son were destined to clash. Joseph’s life in Maida is shaped by three unforgettable characters: by his grandfather Domenico, the family patriarch, a money-lending peasant straight out of Balzac--domineering, opinionated, fearless, a man who stood up to Garibaldi himself; by Domenico’s prodigal son Gaetano, Joseph’s father, who, risking the old man’s wrath, escapes to America at 17; and by the narcissistic, eloquent Antonio, Joseph’s cousin, who flees the tailor shop for Paris, promising to send for Joseph when he can.

It is a family of peasant stubbornness and ultimatums, of terrible feuds and grudges long harbored, of revenge postponed and so sweet when savored. When Gaetano returns to Italy, he is stabbed in a typically inexplicable affair of honor over a young woman. When he marries her, she refuses to return with him to America. Bitter, he returns alone, coming back to Maida only to father his children and to resume a tortured relationship with his father Domenico, who was not above cuffing him in public. When Gaetano dies, his wife refuses to attend his funeral. The family is divided between Italy and America, a perfect metaphor for the divided loyalties which would be the family’s salvation and its curse.

Gaetano spends money in America as fast as he can make it, but he saves one dollar bill to give to his young son Joseph. “Listen to the snap of that paper!” Gaetano says, demonstrating its superiority to the lira. “Listen to the sound of a dollar that’s made of firm fiber!” For the son of generations of tailors, that is high compliment indeed. “Keep this and one day spend it in America. You will buy something wonderful.”

After World War I, the teen-aged Joseph joins his cousin Antonio, who has fled Maida for Paris. Antonio is a flashy, confident Paris boulevardier, tailor to the rich and powerful, the walls of his apartment adorned with the latest nudes and not a crucifix in sight. A man of the world, he is a shrewd observer and a gifted writer, as the many quotes from his journal attest. Antonio is Gay’s literary and spiritual parent; Joseph, his real father, is a much more contained man.

Antonio wants Joseph to stay in Paris, but Joseph, the dollar bill in his pocket, dreams only of America, and spends his father’s dollar to get a visa to go there. First he settles in the company town where his father had lived before him, but finds its ways too much like the narrow village life he had left. On a whim he journeys to the Protestant beach town of Ocean City, N.J. And there--alone, knowing no one, speaking no English, not yet 20 years old, Catholic, hydrophobic--in a sublime act of faith and courage, he decides to stay.

And so, some 500 pages after we casually left it on what seemed only a brief detour, we are back in Ocean City during the war. When the Americans bomb the ancient abbey of Monte Cassino, the two Americas of Gay and his father are brought powerfully together in a confrontation over Gay’s model- airplane collection. That decisive moment, powerfully recreated, is the emotional heart of the book and, without exaggeration, of the immigrant experience itself.

Talese’s high ambition is to connect the lives of ordinary people to the great events that tore them out of their villages; in the process he takes the reader in historical digressions that are often brilliant. Talese’s description of the retreat from Caporetto is told in spare, vivid detail which owes no apology to Hemingway or to Mark Helprin, who, in “A Soldier of the Great War,” recently covered the same ground. At other times, however, those digressions lead the reader into blind canyons and ambushes.

For example, when we finally get to America we are off on a digression within a digression about the family of Richard Mattison, the asbestos king and founder of the company town where Gaetano settles. It is a nice grace note that Mattison’s second wife kept watch with her telescope on squirrels and on the dark Italians who surrounded her. But when she becomes an entire chapter, no matter how well written, the reader groans in despair. Why in the story of the Taleses do we need such detail on the Mattisons, their ancestors back to the 17th Century, their children, their overseers, and their partners? Where is the master tailor to give shape to this garment?

Only by returning to the beginning, after reading the book to the end, does it all begin to make sense. Now we understand Joseph’s pain and his passion, the true depth of his divided loyalties. It’s not that, once returned to port, the author’s navigational skills aren’t appreciated. It’s that, like Columbus, he keeps the compass to himself and we, the humble readers, are lost.

Still, after this grumbling, it is important to point out just how powerful this book really is, and how, in his bold attempt to combine fiction and history, Talese has created many wonderful scenes: the death of Gaetano, an attack on the village by wolves, Joseph teaching himself to drive, Joseph’s first fitting of a buxom American woman, Antonio’s courtship of an aristocrat’s daughter.

Among the best is Antonio’s experience in World War I, culminating in his return to Maida from the battlefield. Not having heard from him in months, his mother has a premonition he will be coming and meets him at the station. She insists they go first to a shrine where she had been praying for her son’s return, so that she could say a final prayer of thanks. Antonio discovers her there, prostrate, “her tongue licking the stones. Horrified, he watched her. . . . Against her protests, he pulled her to her feet and with his arm around her shoulders, forced her out of the place where the faithful still made primitive bargains with God.”

That is how far the author of the controversial sexual odyssey “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” has come in three generations. And as sons must often reject their fathers to stand free of them, so the New World has rejected the old. In accepting and coming to terms with his own father, Talese discovers how much of his father lives in him, and lets us see how much the Old World still lives in us.