The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna: A Novel [Paperback]

Dagoberto Gilb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 1995

Mickey Acuña is a man suspended between a vague past and a vaguer future. Emerging from the landscape of the Southwest, buffeted by life and licking his wounds, he moves into a YMCA to wait for a check that is coming to save him and that demands an address. As days and then weeks pass without its arrival, he picks up work - first odd jobs and then shifts at the cash register of the Y - and hangs out with his neighbors, playing handball, drinking coffee, shooting pool, getting drunk, falling in love or lust with women he meets, works with, passes on the street. In the vacuum of the Y, Mickey finds himself becoming the unwitting center of a community starved for human contact and for meaning: Sarge, with his fast-food coupons; Omar, with his drunken rages and obsession with the vanished Lucy; Rosemary, whose abundant physical presence both attracts and repels him. Mickey fights to maintain his distance and his freedom, until the narrative converges abruptly around him in a profound and shocking conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Recalling the trenchant portraits of the dispossessed urban poor by post-colonial writers like Alex La Guma and Jessica Hagedorn, Gilb's first novel (after the multiple award-winning short-story collection, The Magic of Blood) demonstrates his sensitivity towards the gritty, everyday world of the Southwestern, Chicano underclass. In highly evocative prose that often slides into Spanish, Gilb here portrays the angst-ridden, posturing Mickey Acu?a, who arrives at the El Paso YMCA on the run from an unknown past event looking only for anonymity and a mailing address. Plagued by inertia and self-doubt, waiting for a check that never arrives, obsessed with obtaining an "unpolluted understanding" of his surroundings, Mickey gradually fraternizes with the other disenfranchised Y residents. Gilb focuses on the slow passage of time at the Y and the daily interactions of Mickey's neighbors, like the Charles Manson-esque Reverend Miller and the paranoid loner Charles Towne, both of whom fixate desperately on the delivery of mail. Gilb's unhurried story line occasionally bogs down in the mundane details of life at the Y, yet his characterizations of the underemployed, mentally ill and abandoned men and women who congregate there are vibrant.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Like the powerful stories in his The Magic of Blood (LJ 4/15/93), Gilb's first novel evokes the heat and dust, poverty, lassitude, and passion of the urban Southwest. With an undivulged past and an uncertain future, rugged, itinerant Mickey waits at an El Paso YMCA for a change in fortune. A dime Western is his bible, working out and desultory hanging out his pastimes. Caught between the chronic malaise of shiftlessness and the spark of mischief, competitiveness, and libido he still possesses, Mickey watches the pathos of his neighbors even as he senses his own. At times, the narrative drifts perilously close to a too-accurate reflection of the resignation and pointlessness it limns, but Gilb buoys his tale with sensitivity, acuity, and humor. For larger public libraries and area collections.
Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 218 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st Pbk. Ed edition (September 11, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080213419X
• ISBN-13: 978-0802134196
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #709,752 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dagoberto Gilb was born and raised in Los Angeles and lived as many years in El Paso. He now lives in Austin. Gilb's books have won the PEN/Hemingway Award and have been finalists for the PEN Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award. He edited Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature, the canonical volume of Texas Mexican literature, which won the Southwest Book Award for nonfiction. Anthologized widely, recipient of awards including a Guggenheim and Whiting, his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a range of magazines including Harper's, The New Yorker, and The Threepenny Review. Gilb spent most of his adult years as a construction worker and a journeyman, high-rise carpenter with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Writer-in-residence at the University of Houston-Victoria, he is also the executive director of Centro Victoria: Center for Mexican American Literature and Culture.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "slight" novel? Are you nuts?, May 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna: A Novel (Paperback)

I only finished Gilb's "Magic of Blood" a few days ago and yesterday went out and purchased his novel. I read it without stopping. I felt like I had read a Camus or Beckett set in a border town. His novel is not much like the stories, the subject of this being darker and deeper, and about people who are YMCA residents, people with almost no where else to go. The novel reads smooth and you don't even know something is happening to you until you have finished it. Amazing. A review (above) calls this work "slight"! The novel is not a mixed drink. It's straight bourbon, cognac, or tequila.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's Not The Usual Novel, September 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna: A Novel (Paperback)

I've become pretty blase with most novels that I read. They are stylistically the same so often, with a lot of phony action or angst that I'm supposed to know in my soul or some such. To me those are the usual middle-class to rich kid books with clever inventiveness attached. But a couple of weeks ago I came across a New Yorker that had an essay by Dagoberto Gilb that was so beautiful to read that I decided to go out and buy his books. At first I wasn't sure waht his novel wanted to do, where it was going, but then I realized I wasn't supposed to care about that. it's about as character drawn and plot driven as a poem. The language at first seems unpolished, but it only seems that way. This is a really well written book that made me think about more than just El Paso, Texas and the Mexican border. It reminded me of the book "The Stranger" by Camus--when I was done both, I felt a similar way.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a well-written tale, December 28, 2001

By 

Kirk Alex - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna: A Novel (Paperback)

Gilb can write. I've always gone for writers who had to come up the hard way, had their ups and downs, never had it easy, never had anything handed to them on a silver platter, so Gilb is somebody I would like right off the bat. I admire the man's accomplishments. There's no trickery here. Gilb takes his time and tells his tale in his own, unique style. I also read THE MAGIC OF BLOOD and liked that as well. Looking forward to other works by this fine writer. I gave it five stars .