American Son: A Novel [Paperback]

Brian Ascalon Roley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2001

A powerful novel about ethnically fluid California, and the corrosive relationship between two Filipino brothers.

Told with a hard-edged purity that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, American Son is the story of two Filipino brothers adrift in contemporary California. The older brother, Tomas, fashions himself into a Mexican gangster and breeds pricey attack dogs, which he trains in German and sells to Hollywood celebrities. The narrator is younger brother Gabe, who tries to avoid the tar pit of Tomas's waywardness, yet moves ever closer to embracing it. Their mother, who moved to America to escape the caste system of Manila and is now divorced from their American father, struggles to keep her sons in line while working two dead-end jobs. When Gabe runs away, he brings shame and unforeseen consequences to the family. Full of the ache of being caught in a violent and alienating world, American Son is a debut novel that captures the underbelly of the modern immigrant experience.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hard-hitting and brash, this debut novel takes a cold, clear-eyed look at the American immigrant experience. Come home, urges Uncle Betino in a letter from Manila at the beginning of Roley's tale. But Betino's sister Ika, divorced from her American husband and living in the U.S. with her two sons born in the Philippines, believes even the harsh struggle to survive in California is better than living under the strict caste system of her homeland. One of her boys, Tomas, has assumed the persona of a young Mexican street thug and is helping her make ends meet by raising and selling guard dogs to rich clients. His brother, Gabe, the story's narrator and the good son, seeks to understand the mysteries of his adopted country. Roley uses the familiar Cain-and-Abel approach to illustrate the occasionally vicious tug of wills between the two youths, whose relationship is being slowly altered by the outside forces of the alien American culture. Formerly deemed a mama's boy, Gabe runs away, stealing his brother's prized Oldsmobile and best dog, trying to escape his brother's growing influence. It's not long before he is back home, ashamed and ready to submit to the will of both his brother and America. His mother looks on sadly as both of her boys are swallowed up by the American dream and the promise of the prosperous life at all costs. Despite rare lulls in the plot and an occasional glitch in the novel's overall strong structure, this is a powerhouse story of vulnerable strangers in a brutal, alien land told with stylish restraint, bare-knuckled realism and tender yet tough clarity.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In his debut novel, Roley details the Filipino immigrant experience through the troubled relationship between two brothers and their struggle to assimilate into the culture of Southern California. Gabe, the younger of the two, serves as his family's peacemaker, struggling to maintain good grades while hiding brother Tomas' dangerous activities from his mother. Tomas has adopted the Mexican gangster style of dress and breeds attack dogs that he sells to the Hollywood celebrities who inhabit the fringes of their lives. When Gabe runs away to Northern California, he finds temporary solace in the kindness of strangers: the tow truck driver whose chatty nature belies his own hidden pain; the tart-tongued diner waitress who has family problems of her own. However, when Gabe returns home, he must face the consequences from the increasingly violent Tomas. Roley never judges his characters but rather shows the pain and anger that propel their actions. His clipped and poetic style serves the novel well, and readers will be compelled to follow this tale to its violent and ambiguous conclusion. Brendan Dowling
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (May 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393321541
• ISBN-13: 978-0393321548
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #85,714 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars terrific find, May 10, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: American Son: A Novel (Paperback)

Beautifully written. I originally didn't want to read this book because it looked like a gang novel, but my girlfriend told me it was good. After I got into it I couldn't put it down. It is a really sad, at times painfully so, book. I really got caught up in the characters and the mistakes they would make. I am a Pilipino and found a lot here that resembled my own life growing up, like being ashamed of my own culture and feeling like Filipinos are invisible. The tragedy about these characters is that they suffer from a lack of pride. The mother is especially sad and endearing. This isn't the sort of Asian Ameican novel I've seen before, full of rice and orientalism for the NPR crowd. It's real and honest.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an essential read, November 29, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: American Son: A Novel (Paperback)

I agree with the New York Times reviewer who called this book gripping and heartbreaking. His reading emphasizes "American Son" as a complex look at racism, one that follows two biracial Filipino brothers living in LA a year after the Rodney King Riots. He also notes the complex characters. I would add that this novel is far more than a book about race or ethnicity. It is about mothers and sons, rivalry between brothers, family love, pride and shame, class and envy. It is most of all about shyness. I am surprised to see so many reader reviews by Filipinos. This book is not the sort of comforting Asian American book which follows the tradition of Amy Tan, ones that typically romanticize Asian culture and subscribe to a mythology of an exotic homecountry. Rather it seems to fall more in the tradition of American immigration novels with their themes of assimilation. It inhabits the tradition of such Jewish authors as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, in whose novels you do not find much Yiddish speech or food or quaint stories about the homeland, but whose characters are nonetheless very Jewish, even as they have local concerns. You should not expect to find Filipino Cultural Night here. That is not the point. I have noticed a couple of other books released this year which also eschew the temptation to romanticize (orientalize?) the Asian homeland, "Fixer Chao" by Han Ong, and "Yellow" by Don Lee, also fine books. If Roley owes much to Roth and Bellow in terms of theme, his poetic and lyrical style owes more to Cormack McCarthy, Dennis Johnson, Russell Banks and Ernest Hemmingway. Like those authors he is able to use language to subtly enter the depths of his characters' feelings and pain, gradually accumulating an intense power. Yet he applies the stylistic poetry of these white American writers to get at the pain of racism. This book, in fact, achieves the most intense depiction of the pain racism can cause that I have ever read, and yet Roley does this in a manner which sees all of racism's complexities and is not preachy or heavy handed: he achieves compassion for racists, reveals the self-hatred that minorities can turn on themselves and others, and somehow manages to have deep sympathy for all his primary characters without losing sense of the moral universe they inhabit. Racial attitudes in this book manage to have their own identity, moving among different characters like viruses. Roley adds yet another dimension by incorporating the characters' internalized colonial attitudes which they bring from the Philippines to America, and which drives much of their behavior: so subtly rendered I fear many readers, particularly those unfamiliar with America's imperial history in Asia, will miss this aspect of this most original and complex of novels. Most highly recommended.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lost in Place, June 24, 2001

By 

"[e-mail]" (Santa Cruz, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Son: A Novel (Paperback)

The story of this novel does not come with any clean resolution - rather, it portrays a vicious circle of hopelessness, violence, and unstable identities in multicultural Los Angeles. Roley's spare prose carries both the minute observations and the vulnerability of a teenager forced to grow up too quickly without a father and with an insecure, overworked mother losing her grip on her family.

We see Gabe, the narrator, cower before his brother Tomas' abusive behaviour and anger, eventually becoming attracted to his way of life. Their helpless mother can only watch in despair; however, her resolve strengthens only when she resists her brother's repeated requests to send the two back to Philippines to straighten them out. They probably would not have fared well there anyway, for Gabe and Tomas take considerable pains to deny their maternal Filipino heritage in an environment that only knows Black, Latino, Asian, or White - no hybrid identities here.

Roley's debut novel is a disturbing, yet compelling read, another emerging voice in Filipino-American letters to watch out for.