A trip, with love, in Soprano country

MY WORK often takes me to North Jersey, where the most distinctive parts of the train ride are the long, gray stretches of flat, industrial decay. Rahway, Metuchen, Secaucus, Elizabeth, Lyndhurst, Newark - a roll call of cities trapped in the rusty memory of better times. I'm always glad to see them from the other side of an Amtrak window.

And yet, for a few years at the beginning of this century, North Jersey acquired some style and panache and became almost "cool" when a portly, troubled mobster strutted onto our television screens and into our suspicious hearts.

Tony Soprano, a/k/a James Gandolfini, became a symbol of the swath of swampland where he ruled supreme, a family man who raised the art of being a mobster to the highest levels, an Italian-American male who shucked off the bravado of the brute during those quiet moments that he bared his soul to a beautiful (and beloved by him) psychiatrist.

For reasons I can't quite explain, I fell in love with Tony Soprano. And so, whenever I was headed north to Newark, I'd tell people I was traveling through Soprano country with a knowing smile. And in my ear would play the cool, syncopated baritone of Tony's theme song, the best one since waves crashed against our screen on "Hawaii Five-O."

It was an ensemble show, with tiny masterpieces rendered by people who looked like you and me: sexy and road-worn Carmela, morbid Livia, any number of heavy-browed gents with olive skin and undereye baggage. Any one of them could have popped up in my family photo albums.

But it was Tony Soprano who drew us in, who, in his tortured attempts to live a dual life of "honor" and honor, made us fall in love with him, with his world and with the man who brought him to glorious life on the small screen.

This is not an obituary for James Gandolfini, even though he deserves and will get many good ones. This is not a rumination on the death of a 51-year-old man, someone who was born the same year that I was and grew up in the state next door. This is an attempt to explain how one person can become so much a part of the world that he creates and then inhabits that his passing is personal, because he has become one of us.

I'm not saying I grew up around mobsters, although I'm fairly certain I met a few. At the risk of alienating the folks at the National Italian American Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League, anyone who rubbed shoulders in delis and taprooms and restaurants and on street corners with Italian-Americans shared six degrees of separation with Al Capone. It's just the law of averages.

What I am saying is that Tony Soprano humanized the Italian-American experience in ways that the more elegiac and beautiful "Godfather" films never could. It wasn't quite as rough and ugly as "GoodFellas," and "Sopranos" creator David Chase had a healthier respect for blood than Scorcese, but "The Sopranos" recreated the rougher edges of the second- and third-generation immigrant experience without the golden glow (and ultimate whitewash) of Ellis Island.

Growing up, I knew there were bad people out there who also masqueraded as family men. I heard of loan sharks who walked their daughters down the aisles on their wedding days, proud with swelling chests, and then had "associates" beat up on guys that "forgot" to pay. They were not of my generation, not of my mother's. But they definitely existed.

Tony Soprano was like them, with a twist. He was macho but gentle, a man who apparently loved his wife but had no problem collecting mistresses, was enchanted and frightened by his beautiful daughter and exasperated by his underachieving son. He also had a brain and a conscience, which made life extremely difficult for him when he needed to figure out which grade of piano wire to use on an enemy's throat.

You never got the impression that Michael Corleone had any qualms about his status in life, especially when he went ahead with his brother's murder. Tony killed people, yes, but you never got the sense, even in the later years when the darkest parts of his psyche emerged, that he actually enjoyed it. Or if he did, he also regretted that enjoyment.

It is a great tribute to James Gandolfini that he could inspire these deep ruminations on what was essentially a flashy gimmick that changed the course of cable television and revived the nightime soap opera. This actor was almost Shakespearean in his ability to inhabit a small-screen Lear, a more scrupulous Iago, a Macbeth with a smarter wife. It's due to him that we loved the man and hated what he did, as opposed to simply hating the man.

What a talent. What a loss. Ciao, amore, ciao.