Son of the Mob

Vince’s mother is known throughout the novel simply as “Mom.” Unlike Vince’s father, whom even Vince often refers to as Anthony Luca, she is never given any other name. Her namelessness serves to underscore her primary function throughout the novel, which is that of serving dinners and holding up family protocol. At the same time, it serves to emphasize her mysteriousness to her own family, the extent of which only becomes clear at the end of the novel, when she is revealed to have been the mastermind behind the “Calabrese hit.”

Vince’s mother seems to spend all of her time in the kitchen, as opposed to the outside world, and she comes across as someone who is fiercely domestic and concerned with decorum. Her ruthlessness is not separate from her interest in keeping the family together; rather it is tied up with it. An early hint of this comes in a scene where she shoves a rebellious young gangster’s hand into a hot chicken pot pie, in order to discipline him. Although Vince was a near-witness to this scene–he was in the next room when it happened—he still tends to underestimate his mother and to not take her seriously. He perceives her as worrying too much and as living in an overly small world. She can therefore be said to have the last word at the end of the novel, when she shows herself to have some significant clout in the larger world and to be a protector, as well as a caretaker, of her family.

Although Anthony Luca happens to be a crime boss, he is also an old-fashioned, strict and inscrutable father. He lectures Vince about his lack of “motivation,” worrying that Vince is complacent and spoiled. He also pressures his son to join the family business. He is the most feared gangster around; yet, in the way of truly powerful men, his manner is reasonable and mild. He is never shown threatening anyone or inflicting violence himself; he can order other men to do that, and he knows that the mere use of his name is enough to intimidate people. (The family name is also, as we see, enough to greatly complicate Vince’s life.)

Anthony Luca has more of a presence in the novel than does Vince’s mother, but he also has less surprises up his sleeve, and seemingly fewer dimensions to his character. His surprises are on the level of strategy, rather than personality; at the end of the novel, he reveals himself to have been one step ahead of Vince in his dealings with Ed Mishkin and Johnny Rat. In other words, he shows himself to be even smarter and wilier than Vince had believed he was; past this, we learn little that is new or surprising about him. Perhaps because he is the character around whom all of the other characters in the novel revolve, he is also the character who changes the least.

Anthony Luca’s one eccentricity (at least apart from his livelihood) is his carpentry hobby, at which he displays an endearing combination of determination and incompetence. It is significant that many of his father-son chats with Vince take place while he is busy carving an ugly, useless piece of furniture; his carpentry hobby underscores his clumsiness in the intimate, domestic realm, but also his desire to connect.

Tommy is Vince’s older brother. He is as avid about the gangster life as Vince is appalled by it, and embraces the family business with a thuggish zeal that is deemed excessive even by their father, who hires Ray Francione to “babysit” Tommy; that is, to reign in Tommy’s tendencies towards violence and flashiness. While Tommy is a limited character, he is self-aware enough to know that he is limited, and also to realize that he is being monitored. He tells Vince that he knows that Vince is smarter than he (Tommy) is, and that Tommy himself will probably always be a henchman, rather than a crime boss.

Yet even Tommy turns out to have his own brand of sneakiness and guile, which he demonstrates by setting up an illegal betting site on Vince’s class project website. As well as being an illegal act, this is also a sabotaging and an undermining one: an attempt to impose his messy gangster reality on Vince’s orderly, good-student existence, and thus to bring Vince down to his level. Yet it can also be seen as an attempt simply to keep Vince close and in the family, and therefore to have as much to do with love as it does with jealousy and resentment.

Kendra is Vince’s off-and-on girlfriend. She is the daughter of an FBI agent, which is the main obstacle to their relationship; however, she and Vince have a few underground qualities in common. They are both smart and thoughtful, and they both have altruistic impulses, even if Kendra channels these impulses by taking lifesaving lessons in her spare time, while Vince channels them by helping out gangsters. They are both independent loners in a conformist and superficial culture, as is seen by their bonding at a large drunken college party, at which they are equally uncomfortable. Even their very different backgrounds are not as different as they at first seem, and are in fact mirror images of one another: because of their backgrounds, Kendra and Vince both have a sense of being outsiders, and are in some ways older and wiser than the other teenagers around them. They are both much more aware than is the average teenager of what it is that their parents do for a living, perhaps because both their parents’ jobs are entire ways of life, as much as they are jobs. 

Kendra has a logical, buttoned-down persona, but also an impulsive, wild side, which Vince helps her to explore. He encourages her to bring her secret karaoke habit out into the open, and also–by virtue of belonging to a crime family–allows her to rebel a little from her own family. In the end, it turns out to be Kendra’s impulsiveness that saves Vince’s family; she has inadvertently taped herself singing karaoke over her father’s tape-recording of an incriminating conversation between Vince’s mother and Uncle Ray. In doing so, she has kept Vince’s mother from being sent to jail.

As a reasonable and sympathetic gangster, Ray Francione is an ideal confidante for Vince. He understands the particularities of Vince’s situation, and speaks the same language that Vince’s family speaks; at the same time, he has a calmness and a detachment that Vince’s family does not have at all. Vince can lean on him and confide in him in a way that he cannot with his own family, telling him about both his romantic problems and his adventures with Jimmy and Ed.

It is therefore a blow to Vince when Ray Francione turns out not to be who he seems. At the same time, it is a confirmation of what Vince has always suspected about Ray: that he does not belong in the gangster life. And as with Vince and Kendra, Vince and Ray’s friendship turns out to be stronger than the forces separating them; this is seen in a surprising small act of loyalty on Ray’s part, near the end of the book. Even when Ray no longer has to, he still acts as an arranger and a benevolent “fixer” in Vince’s life.