Movie-Telling: A Review of Salvatore Pane’s short story collection, The Neorealist in Winter

The short story form serves us well when we sense that we are beside each character, witnessing their lives as they stumble or soar. In its best context, a narrative will surprise us toward cultivating our own imaginations. Yet, one or two gifted writers welcome us into their world as if we are read-watching their favorite movie with them.

        Enter Salvatore Pane.

Pane’s collection of short stories, The Neorealist in Winter (Available through Autumn House Press and winner of the Autumn House Fiction Prize), swings through time the way a good flashback might enhance the current moment of a screenplay, and his characters behave so enduringly cinematic that a director could bring them to life. Pane has shared 11 stories that move in a quirky pace while introducing his characters’ thoughts and values beyond mere familiarity. Instead, we are rewarded with intimate inclusion among his people.

Perhaps the beauty of both fiction and film is an author’s ability to choose just the right line at the right time. Queue the accolades for Salvatore Pane!

When Christopher gets shunned by a barroom beauty in New Jersey (“Zeitgeist Comics, 1946”) he (the character) cleverly pauses to consider his retort - a moment which Pane navigates masterfully through direct and witty dialogue. But Christopher won’t be stumped as he tries to save the comic book publication he loves so dearly. The tragic-comedy surrealism of this tale alone reminds us that, like life, good storytelling often does not end as we might imagine.

Pane’s nods to Italian culture do not weigh the book down while the struggle of failing-city / emerging-suburb life of a post-World War 2 America inform several narratives, and an end-of-the-tunnel, post-millennial reflection / nostalgia / optimism bookends the influences that seem to have developed Pane as a writer while inspiring his stories.

Most powerfully, the escapism is not romantic and forgiving in the way that a two-hour stay at the cinema house sometimes forces us to accept a story’s buy-in. Rather, Pane’s sentences remove you from the context of your moment and place you under the same tension as his characters, but do so as if your own zeitgeist could affect the outcome. Aside from one misplaced intrusion of a broken fourth wall that seems to be arbitrary, the stories of The Neorealist in Winter deftly echo with the struggles of finding happiness in career or vocations, and within family both borne or chosen, or perhaps somewhere out there among an America where loneliness feels like consequences more than happenstance.

Overall, our Winter Neorealist handles humor and life as literature and film shall - sometimes hilariously and sometimes heartbreakingly. From one of many great similes (“produced a cigar and puffed it like a plantation owner”) to countless examples of the profound (“staring into the heart of the city that had raised them”), this collection pays homage to film and tells damn good stories without clobbering the reader like a Goodfellas mobster. (wink, wink)

If a story can begin anywhere, then we have to trust a narrator to take us everywhere. Pane crafts his fiction like a poised film director but does not lean into melodrama, and we will all be a bit better from his efforts.

Roll credits: Salvatore Pane is a writer on the rise whose stories need to be shared.