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The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue

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Every writer has the power to rescue their troubled characters. Brave writers do not. Manuel Munoz is a brave writer. This is a collection of stories that honors the idea that in our lived lives we are not the sole authors of our respective destinies. Here, the rewards handed out for goodness, and the punishments for transgression, are appropriately capricious and true to life. In remarkable stories like "Tell Him About Brother John," Munoz uses precise and purposeful language to explore the sometimes painful contradictions between what his characters desire and what life will deliver them. It is the deft delivery of these contradictions which sets THE FAITH HEALER OF OLIVE AVENUE apart as truly fine achievement. In the above mentioned story, for example, the title character offers a breathless and heartbreaking confession, only to be cut off by the story's narrator, who tells us he "learned long ago to keep things simple. Don't tell much. Don't tell everything. Don't reveal what people don't need to or want to know." Thankfully, even with reluctant characters such as this, Munoz finds surprising and moving ways to show humans truly being.

These ten superbly written stories are set within the homes of "Gold Street" and the Mexican-American neighborhood of Central California, a community that both embraces and shuns its cultural past and fellow residents. Grief, loss, alienation, abandonment and accidents haunt all of these stories and characters -- husbands leave wives and families, women fight with their neighbors or don't speak to them at all for years and years, young men struggle with their sexuality and only find their future within their pasts. The opening story, "Lindo y Querido," is a heartbreaking account of an immigrant maid, aged and isolated from her neighbors, who uncovers her teenaged son's secrets while cleaning his bedroom after his death from a motorcycle accident. Many of these stories deal with familiar gay themes in extraordinary ways. In "Bring Brang Brung," one of the collection's finest tales, a gay widower and a reluctant father, returns to the neighborhood with his young adopted son and finds an unexpected ally in his sister. In "Ida y Vuelta," a man returns home for a short visit when his father becomes ill, bringing along his new lover while staying with the man he left after a fifteen-year relationship. In "The Comeuppance of Lupe Rivera," a young gay man is drawn into to the glamour and tragedy of his scandalous neighbor. Munoz's prose is controlled and poignant and I seldom wanted to step away from any of these stories -- the author's characters' struggles resonate because these events could happen in any neighborhood. My favorite story, "Tell Him About Brother John," finds two men, friends from teens, reunited, with one man offering up a confession of his life, while the other choses to continue to keep his life secret.

These stories are poignant and extremely well-written. They are brilliantly interrelated and sequenced to heighten emotional impact. I don't read quite enough to offer an authoritative opinion, but outside of acknowledged masters of the form (Cheever, Updike, Munro etc.) I can't recall a more consistent and satisfying collection.

The stories in this collection are soul-wrenching. Munoz does an excellent job of putting you directly into the mind and heart of his many and varied characters. You find yourself identifying with people whom you might never meet, sympathetic characters even though (or maybe because) they are flawed. I am so glad I got to read this book, and I hope Mr. Munoz produces another one soon.

I happened upon this book at a book browse at Half Price Books. I started reading the first couple of pages and had to buy. It is beautiful written and the type of authorship that pulls you right in. You will care deeply about the characters and the setting. Many of the stories are told through Mexican, male, gay characters-- I am none of those things but it doesn't matter. The stories are universal and will stay with you, no matter who you are. This book is a real triumph. I rarely write reviews and read a lot of books. Occasionally, like now, I am moved enough to let the world know. And, since I am often interrupted, I prefer a collection of short stories. Few authors master short stories like Munoz.

In the sprawling exurbs of Manuel Muñoz's Central California, Fresno and Bakersfield are considered "downtown" and Los Angeles is "Over There." The characters in these ten stories--parents and cousins, fugitives and outcasts, shut-ins and loafers--all scratch out their livings in these weather-beaten oases; all have faced desolation and have come through the other side, if barely. The grief of losing a child, the devastation of thwarted love, the exhaustion of physical incapacitation, the disenchantment of shattered dreams--their crises are behind them and we watch these men and women pick up the pieces of shattered lives. In several stories, gay men negotiate the border between the machismo flaunted in their Mexican American hometowns and the emotional strains caused by the secrecy of their double lives. There are no tidy resolutions here, just hopes weighed down by disillusionment and revelations that lead only to further uncertainty.

There's not a dud in the collection, but three stories haunted me with a distressing vigor months after I read them. I initially found "Tell Him about Brother John" in an O. Henry Prize anthology, which prompted me to purchase this book. Reading it a second time only underscored the subtle mastery of the author's empathy for the two men who have come home, each recovering from a broken heart. When one of them, a promising student whose failure disappoints the community elders, confesses to the other, the second awkwardly cuts him off: "Keep it to yourself." The selection's central premise is emphatically encapsulated in a sentence that could serve as the theme for the entire book: "No one needs to know the whole story."

In the title story, a young man is incapacitated after a horrific workplace accident, and his elderly father, barely able to care for him, desperately seeks salvation--and a glimmer of hope--from a curandera, a "witch woman." But the story (and the scene) that most troubles my sleep is the "The Heart Finds Its Own Conclusion," in which Cecilia drives to the bus station to rescue his prodigal cousin, returning from a life with a rough crowd. What happens when the bus finally arrives is both startling and upsetting.

This book takes something from you. It breaks your heart and puts it back together only to break it again.

Mr. Muños just received the extremely prestigious Whiting Award for "The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue". I can't wait to read this book. Congratulations!