BLUE ITALIAN

BLUE ITALIAN Rita Ciresi (Ecco Press, $22) Wisecracking social worker Rosa Salvatore believes her husband, Gary, is having an affair: How else to explain his flagging interest in sex? That he actually has cancer -- a diagnosis he keeps secret until the doctors are certain -- is the tragic irony with which Ciresi opens her debut novel. What follows are intimate flashbacks of the couple's bumpy three-year marriage, stunted by their twisted family backgrounds -- Rosa's bickering working-class parents are ''coarse and bitter as coffee grinds''; Gary's snooker-playing Jewish mother henpecks her successful husband. Stereotypes aside, Ciresi wields biting humor, tactile prose, and a three-hankie finale in this vibrant tableau of marriage's imperfections and redemptions. B+