Early in Christopher Castellani's new novel, "All This Talk of Love," Frankie Grasso wonders whether he and his family are "at the end of something." Frankie is a 30-ish graduate student in English literature, still a long way from the end of (for one thing) his dissertation. An answer begins to take shape when his sister, an affluent stay-at-home mom who has never strayed far from their childhood home in Delaware, organizes a family trip to Santa Cecilia, the village in Italy where their parents grew up. For all of the Grassos, the very idea of the trip stirs up thoughts of old losses, ghosts that shadow the present, prompted by the dissonant fact that like many if not most Italian-Americans, Antonio and Mad­dalena Grasso enshrined in their children a glowing image of things Italian yet never took them to Italy or even taught them the language. Feeling oneself "at the end of something," this slyly ambitious novel suggests, may well be the existential condition of being Italian-American.

This is the third book Castellani has devoted to the Grassos, a series of novels that with their mellifluous, gently satirical style and dark, elegiac heart, form something of an opera buffa of the immigrant experience. The first two, "A Kiss From Maddalena" and "The Saint of Lost Things," followed Antonio and Maddalena from the desperation of wartime Italy through their early years in America. "All This Talk of Love" jumps forward a few decades. Now Antonio's restaurant, Al Di Là, has become a great success, and it's time to hand it over. He and Maddalena, who is becoming worryingly forgetful, are preoccupied by the images from the past that have been stirred by the prospect of this final trip. They have already lost a child under wrenching circumstances, and now they are trying to chart a path through the indignities of old age. Frankie and his sister, Prima, have never had to worry about the sort of troubles that plagued their parents' youth, but they still have soul-wearying anxieties: they're unsure of how they're supposed to live, how to realize ambitions that are inconceivable to their parents.

In the Grassos and their multilayered conflicts, Castellani has created an answer of sorts to Gay Talese's observation, 20 years ago in these pages, that no serious Italian-American writer has achieved the popular stature of a Scorsese or a Sinatra. Talese described Italian-Americans as the descendants of a people "united in the fear of being found out." Italian-Americans were steered away from academic tracks, he argued, and then for decades even literary-minded Italian-Americans like Talese got a cold shoulder from the publishing establishment. Castellani hasn't written the big, defining, Scorsese-scale novel Talese was missing — he's too fine-boned a writer, and perhaps too fond of tidy resolutions many would call sentimental — but he has elegantly captured the essence of Talese's argument.

At the center of "All This Talk of Love" is Frankie, a bookish loner whose dream of becoming an important literary scholar — he yearns "to contribute an enduring, crystalline text to the field of postcolonial studies" — baffles his parents. He wrestles not only with their disapproval but with his own inconvenient knowledge that his graduate school is "solidly second-tier," turning out lowly composition teachers rather than academic stars. With his ever expanding dissertation and his mediocre career prospects, he takes consolation in his sensual life: "As far as Frankie knows, he is the only one sleeping with a professor, an advantage he counts as distinct in the job market." Soon enough it becomes clear that his lover — who "makes Frankie call her Professor even when she's naked" — isn't just condescending, she's treacherous. When he decides not to tell her about the trip to Italy, it's because he can't bear the thought of her "expert analysis" of the Grassos' "tragedy-marked immigrant saga." Her own family, Castellani writes, "calls to mind one of those bleak Rust Belt upbringings people of substance spend the rest of their lives renouncing and American novelists try, lamely, again and again, to illuminate." Note that gratuitous "lamely." It's easy to imagine Frankie's frustration, in trying to crack the codes of the American cultural elite, as a stand-in for Castellani's own.

Prima, married to a successful accountant, mother of four boys, proud of her ample and spotless house, able to arrange parties at the country club, has everything her parents' generation dreamed of. Yet she's a ridiculous figure, one kitchen renovation away from the Real Housewife realm, a cautionary embodiment of the Italian-American strain that sticks close to home and concentrates on material ambition. With no career and her youngest child finishing high school, she can't sleep, worries constantly about her parents and looks away when she stumbles across her sons' bad behavior. She imagines that her role as party mom keeps her boys close, but just to be sure she stalks one of their girlfriends. Her shallowness, rashness and self-deception are so well drawn that I didn't buy her transformation, by the end of the book, into something far mellower. But I admire Castellani's generosity toward even his least appealing characters.

In the end, though, Maddalena, with her graceful heartbroken fortitude, is the one Castellani adores, and he renders her decline into dementia with a loving attention to detail. In all three books, she's a sympathetic heroine, if oddly passive — but that's perhaps fitting, since she represents a type that's fading from history. Among the many ethnographic details Castellani gets right is the Italian-­American penchant for settling down with the Irish, as both Grasso children do. The elder Grassos' story ends on a hopeful note, with Al Di Là passing into the seemingly capable hands of a grandson. He's half Irish, doesn't speak Italian and has never set foot in their native country, which will strike some of us as one more inevitable, melancholy stroke of the ethnic eraser.

By Maria Russo / The New York Times