Pietro di Donato, in his semi-autobiographical novel Christ in Concrete, depicts the life, work and community of Italian immigrants in New York City in the 1920s. The protagonist Paul serves as a bridge between and a product of the Italian and American cultures, and undergoes experiences which force him to consider and reconsider all of the major belief systems upon which he has relied in the past. He resists the oppression of workers in the American system of economics, just as he resists the traditional Italian (Catholic) response to troubles in life, which his mother urges upon him. The end of the book finds Paul in the role of a kind of "Christ in concrete" himself, in which he represents the worker who must look to himself and other workers to win justice for themselves.
At the beginning of the book the author immerses the reader in the most horrible aspects of the experiences of the Italian immigrants in New York, with the terrible death on the job of a worker--Paul's father--serving as the context for those horrors. Before the death of Geremio, however, the author quickly establishes the richness of the Italian culture, especially its vitality and its language (Engishized, but no less ethnic in its power and uniqueness). He also demonstrates his ability to capture that culture as well as to succinctly describe the relationship between the workers and their attitude toward their grueling work.
For Geremio, this grueling work ends with an even more grueling death, being buried literally alive in concrete. His references to Jesus Christ and the link between his death and the title set this book and its theme up as something far more significant than a labor struggle, as important as that struggle is in its own right. The economic, social and cultural issues are finally overwhelmed, or at least subsumed, by the spiritual. Even more importantly, the author shows that the individual and the social and the spiritual are all c...