Brown
McGreevy, Richard Rodriguez John T
BOOKS The melted pot Brown The Last Discovery of America Richard Rodriguez Viking, $24.95,232pp. John T. McGreevy I salute Richard Nixon," explains Richard Rodriguez, "the dark father of...
...Perhaps the recent deluge of memoirs (few, if any of which compare to Hunger of Memory) has sated my appetite...
...And Rodriguez really does salute Richard Nixon...
...John T. McGreevy I salute Richard Nixon," explains Richard Rodriguez, "the dark father of Hispa-nicity...
...John T. McGreevy is the author of Catholicism and American Freedom: A History, from Slavery to Abortion, to be published next spring by W. W. Norton...
...He returns to affirmative action repeatedly in Brown as well, with jabs at even Nixon for making working-class whites pay "the price of affirmative action, not Kennedys...
...Brown is Rodriguez's third collection of essays in the last twenty years, essays written between editorials for the Los Angeles Times and commentary on PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer...
...The future of the United States, Rodriguez tells us, is brown, not simply because Latinos make up a large (and growing) percentage of the population...
...The line is perfect...
...Islamic terrorists, apparently, are "inauthentic men" refusing to be "seduced" by "brown...
...None of this is dull, and Rodriguez's sharp eye for detail, what he terms "the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onions," allows him to paint a series of vivid portraits...
...When Rodriguez dissects yet another incident from college days, or again refers to his youthful curiosity about the glamour of New York literary society, the patience of long-time readers wears thin...
...More fragmented than Hunger of Memory, Brown still conveys Rodriguez's stylish mix of observation and literary flair, and his novelist's preference for individual experience over academic abstraction...
...Genuine literature "abhors the typical...
...Still a certain claustrophobia pervades Brown...
...Rodriguez himself-a "queer Catholic Indian Spaniard" living in San Francisco, "a temperate Chinese city in a fading blond state in a post-Protestant nation"-must be "shelved Brown...
...He writes "about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America...
...But perhaps Rodriguez needs to step outside his San Francisco apartment, beyond his Sacramento childhood, and thoroughly investigate some aspect of the coining Brown world that he sketches in intriguing (but broad) strokes...
...Rodriguez's strained effort to link the book to the events of September 11 is hard to read...
...He is discouraged to learn that a beloved parish priest has confided his disapproval of Rodriguez's "lifestyle" and yet he is convinced that his own Catholicism is not simply a choice, since at one time "it was the air, it was the light...
...On display are Rodriguez's mordant wit and his deadly serious undertone (regulations developed during the Nixon administration forced United States citizens to define themselves as white, black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American...
...Nixon grinding out good grades, Nixon desperate to see the world beyond small-town California, Nixon uneasy in the world of wealth and privilege, evokes for Rodriguez memories of his own boyhood...
...He is especially good at registering his distaste for a publishing industry obsessed with simple-minded markers of identity and the frustrations of a gay Catholic...
...His first book, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, is a twentieth-century classic, a haunting meditation on his experience as the child of Mexican immigrants in Sacramento, as a devout Catholic boy at Sacred Heart School, and as a scholarship student at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley...
...Too often lost in the polemical back-and-forth with his critics was Rodriguez's beautiful appreciation of language, his recognition that fluency in English, demanded by his parents, distanced him from them as well...
...Controversy surrounded Hunger of Memory because Rodriguez offered searing criticism of bilingual education and affirmative action, daring stances in 1982...
...Instead, a Catholic Latino culture now blurs into the Protestant North...
...In this sense we are on familiar ground...
...Too many of Rodriguez's observations rest on questions from audiences at his own public readings, a close cousin to gauging public opinion by polling the cab driver on the way to a luxury hotel...
Vol. 129 • September 2002 • No. 15
