4.0 out of 5 stars
Men Being Men, Being Human, May 9, 2011
This review is from: Men without Bliss (Chicana and Chicano Visions of the Americas series) (Hardcover)
A fundamental fact that gets lost in the raging debate over undocumented workers is their humanity: the media and politicians, among others, rarely talk about them as the multi-dimensional, emotionally complex individuals they are. Enter Rigoberto González and his grab-you-by-the-collar collection of short stories, "Men Without Bliss." The doleful title announces an absence that defines the life of every character, male and female. Bliss is as remote from these lives as truth is from the myth of el otro lado. For most of these memorable characters--and they will keep nagging at you long after you've put the book down--bliss might be something as simple and taken for granted as an unremarkably quiet day or night unintruded upon by the law, pesky relatives, the dead. Or their own dark, ceaselessly churning thoughts. In these consistently poignant, richly satisfying stories, González reminds us that the human condition is a complicated thing, whether one is a disillusioned former dance instructor ready to pack up and head down the yellow-brick road ("Road to Enchantment"), a farmworker engaged in illicit activity ("Good Boys"), or the title story's 38-year-old slacker who works the graveyard shift at a group home.
Let's be clear: González's breathtaking vignettes of men's lives are not uplifting antidotes to the vitriol of anti-immigrant, anti-Latino agendas. But what these stories do offer, in generous measure, is a potent reminder: ethnic groups, such as Chicanos, are not monolithic. Like all groups, we have our fervidly politicized, our apolitical, our long-suffering, our on-the-make. In other words, González's fiction underscores for us the fact that Chicano identity is a many splendored, sometimes fragmented thing. It should be noted that one of the wonderfully complicating aspects of that identity is sexuality: several characters are openly, unapologetically gay. But it would be inaccurate to label González's inclusion of these gay men in his stories as "brave," anymore than we'd consider it brave for any author to write honestly--and compellingly--about the broad, messy range of what it means to be human. It is, however, a much welcome expansion of Chicano letters' tent.
One `character' that looms large over these achingly beautiful stories is their setting: the Caliente Valley in Southern California, a region that stands in for Hell in the collection. Virtually all the characters are trying to find their way out of the fictional Valley. In "Mexican Gold," the characters are always scheming about how they'll abandon the God-forsaken place, a dreamed-of act that neatly mirrors their feeling that they've been abandoned by the living as well as by the dead. In another story, "Your Malicious Moons," the use of second-person voice implicates the reader to wondrous effect.
This all-consuming need to escape their lives results in the stories being suffused with a beautiful sadness. And when the characters do achieve even momentary release from brutal realities, it is more often than not a cruel joke, as in the stand-out "Good Boys," where after long hours of working in the fields, brothers Melchor, Gaspar, and Baltazar, three magos, regularly visit a local nightclub "full of men and women pretending to have a good time, making believe they aren't the same people who, just hours before, have been kneeling on dirt, fated to return to the same filthy earth day after day after day." And even though the backdrop of this stunning narrative is a sprawling valley of tears--the brothers toil in lachrymal onion fields--the story is a closet drama, an intimate play whose setting gives rise to a particularly noxious variety of physical and emotional claustrophobia.
When González's characters tread stereotypic, macho terrain, we are keenly aware that they are essentially good, even heroic men who have fallen prey to tragic flaw. The stories of these fallen angels, such as the tender-hearted murderer Rolando in "Cactus Flower," are the stuff of poetry in González's masterful hands. Rolando, who lives with the ghost of Mirinda, the wife he killed, recalls Chihuahua, the home they gave up for the housing projects of el norte, as "a space so large it is like living inside breath itself." There the tranquil evenings are "long and familiar, blooming with stars [...] that love Mirinda so much they confuse her for the moon and crown her head." The marvelous grinds against a bitter truth, blurring the line of demarcation between them.
"Men Without Bliss" is divided into two sections, "Men in the Caliente Valley" and "Men in Other Places," an organizing strategy that invites comparison. While the stories that comprise each part are searing, it is the eight stories in the former that shine with a fierce luminosity--truth being their light source--too rarely encountered in contemporary U.S. fiction. That is not to slight the latter, for there is not a weak one in this emotionally wrenching collection.
A cavil: "Men Without Bliss" is marred only by the publisher's unfortunate display of sloppy copy editing.
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