SOURCE: Deasy, Philip. “To the Nadir.” Commonweal 72 (19 August 1960): 429-30.

In the following review, Deasy dismisses Three Circles of Light as “a cliché-ridden, overdone piece of hokum.”

Twenty-one years ago Pietro Di Donato wrote a best-seller, largely autobiographical, about a West Hoboken Italian bricklayer and his family, entitled Christ in Concrete. In Three Circles of Light, he returns to the same scene and the same family, but to a time period about ten years earlier than that of the first novel, to the years, that is, immediately before and immediately after World War I. Paolino di Alba, the youngster protagonist of the present novel, is the Paul, the central character of Christ in Concrete. The death of Geremio, Paul's father, so searingly described in the opening of Christ in Concrete, is the closing episode of Three Circles of Light.

A loose collection of episodes rather than a sustained...