BURN IT ALL DOWN

A seriocomic coming-of-age tale in which a young man describes the many bad choices he and his mother make in less than a week.

When life gives 18-year-old Joey Rossi and his mother, Gianna, lemons, they wreak havoc. His boyfriend cheats on him. Her married lover dumps her after two years of promising divorce, dangling the marriage carats. And they’ve been here before. Gianna was pregnant at 16, and the abusive father was soon gone. Other nasty lovers followed. Now she’s 34, working as a hairdresser. Joey has a part-time job stuffing cannoli at Mozzicato’s Bakery while he finishes high school. Grandma has Dean Martin’s “Volare” on the radio and throws around words like stunad, chadrools, and pisello. They live in Bayonne, “the exact opposite of rich-people New Jersey.” They drink Luna di Luna at $16 a magnum and they’ve had a lot of it when they decide to trash Joey's boyfriend’s car and Gianna's lover’s seven-figure house in Short Hills (“the capital of rich-people New Jersey”). Only they get carried away in the mansion and start a fire. Soon they’re on the road, on the lam, on their way to the rustic rural home of Marco, the one former lover who didn’t mistreat Gianna. Is there a happy ending up ahead? DiDomizio creates an appealing mother-son relationship of comfortably shared lives, including a peculiar affection for Monica Lewinsky. (What would Monica do?”) He takes a chance with having Joey narrate because he’s a young 18 with a tendency to whine at misfortune, which drags on the generally light tone. The humor also often smacks of sitcom, both in predictability and ethnic color. It suggests an elevator pitch to mash up The Sopranos and Everybody Loves Raymond.

An uneven but entertaining debut.