Italian-Americans have the third lowest rate of higher education in the United States, behind blacks and Latinos. They call themselves "Italian" but can't speak Italian. Fearful parents, still as mistrustful of schools as were many of their peasant grandparents, express hostility to their kids' high school teachers, then keep their college-age children close to home, allowing them to apply only to "mediocre local colleges," forbidding them from participating in rites of passage like spring-break trips to Florida. The kids take on tough personas -- the Guido, the Bimbette -- as a defense against a mainstream American culture that, they're certain, would never accept them anyway. They ape Hollywood-created mobster mannerisms and attitudes. "The culture is a mélange of fact and fiction," she concludes. Bensonhurst residents "are forced to cling to a distant culture they will never fully know."

Picture Christopher from "The Sopranos" -- not Michael Imperioli, the accomplished and well-paid actor who plays the role, but the character himself. Think about his personality traits: hot-tempered, quick to take affront. Not what his teachers would call bright, but possessed of a fierce survival instinct. He's hostile toward authority, but has a savvy ability to align himself with the most powerful people around him. He's got a taste for cocaine. A taste for tarted-up, tough-talking chicks. A hidden core of sensitivity, emotional accessibility and vulnerability, which might have made him a fine actor. A furious mistrust of anyone who witnesses this emotional side, which makes his forays into acting end badly.

Now picture this Christopher living an Italian-American life without any connection to mobsters (except in his not-so-secret fantasies). He's angry a lot of the time -- he feels people are always disrespecting him -- but he never gets to shoot anyone. When he and his friends walk into a restaurant, there is no instant hush, no necks craning. His drug binges clean out his bank account; maybe he goes through a really bad period and ends up in rehab. He finished a couple of years at the community college, but it didn't give him much of an idea of what to do with himself. He's worked hard in his life -- on construction jobs, or on the back of a garbage truck, or in a deli his friend owns -- but when he gets sick of all that he may fall for a dumb scheme that promises guys like him easy riches: selling fake stocks over the phone, maybe. He may end up in trouble for this too. Oh, and that high-heeled, hair-sprayed chick he ended up with bitches day and night, always trying to boss him around. You can hear their fighting through the walls of their house. Not counting the occasional Saturday-night foray into a Manhattan club, he's been out of New Jersey exactly twice in his life.

Part of how "The Sopranos" works -- how the mob genre has come to be the most vital expression of Italian-American culture -- is that it takes this kind of harsh, prosaic, limited third-generation immigrant life, takes these inarticulate, yearning palookas, and adds a veneer of glamour and excitement to their struggles. In a way, the very success of the Mafia-movie genre has caused Italian-Americans to strike a secret, perhaps unconscious bargain: The movies deliver a version of their ordinary life -- the pasta, the Sinatra, the ever-present relatives -- but with the thrill of always-impending violence and piles of money.

The trade-off is that these works depict Italian-Americans as mobsters, not the upstanding citizens most are. But if Tony Soprano really were in the garbage business, after all, we would never watch a show about him. The great Italian-American popular artists have struck this bargain even more directly: From Sinatra to Scorsese and Coppola, they owe a certain portion of their own glamour, and in the case of the directors, the grandeur of their subject matter, to the mob. In mob movies, the stakes in Italian-American life seem really high; Someone could get offed at any moment, and wads of hundred-dollar bills are always appearing out of nowhere. Whereas in the reality of Italian-American life, the big family feud ends up with the usual round of shouting and insults, maybe some door-slamming, someone storming out of the house. When things get really bad, Uncle Al ends up not talking to Aunt Linda for years.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"