Could He be Our Dickens?
BOTTUM, J.
Books Could He Be Our Dickens? By J. Bottum It's such a small thing the American novelist Oscar Hijuelos has done: just a little twist in the narrative structure of the novel of recollection, too...
...Hijuelos's first novel, Our House in the Last World, is an example of this approach, even though the novelist is clearly struggling to find the sense in it, to uncover the moral tale in his parents' immigration from Cuba to the United States...
...Ives' Christmas (though surely Habl?t Browne's famous Pickwick illustrations were signed Phiz, not Phil...
...And in the second place, memory simply doesn't move in straight-forward chronology...
...Looking at the altar he remembered another of his childhood thoughts: in the same way that the baby Jesus, the promise of the world, lay resting in His crib, adored by the magi and the shepherds, and basking in the warmth of angelic and familial love, so did the man Jesus, down from the Cross and awaiting His final resurrection, lay resting inside the altar, beneath the crimsoned cloth...
...But though the writing is astonishingly precise for a first novel, it lacks a narrative solution to the young hero's retrospective account of his parents' lives...
...For them, there is no center to the self, there is no intelligible structure to the world, and the strangeness of memory when accurately presented proves it so...
...Ives' Christmas, Hijuelos makes a small change in his novels, a little twist in his narrative technique, noticing the way in which a single sharp grief focuses memory and gives an edge to the self: Again and again [Mr...
...The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is a bawdy book and insists too relentlessly on the lustiness of Cesar's sex life...
...He recalls the endless number of women he has known, and remembers his brother- always his brother: On whatever track he sets his memory to play, Cesar eventually comes back to Nestor's lifelong melancholy and death in a car wreck...
...Ives' Christmas...
...By J. Bottum It's such a small thing the American novelist Oscar Hijuelos has done: just a little twist in the narrative structure of the novel of recollection, too technical on its face to be of much interest to any but the most determined scholar...
...Three years later, in 1993, Hijuelos published The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien-a true "large loose baggy monster" (Henry James's memorable description of Dickens's novels...
...Ives' Christmas particularly, a talent for matching character and word: The book is narrated in a sparse but formal sort of prose, much like Ives himself...
...He has taken modern literature's favorite device for denying that any moral self stands at the center of a story, and turned it inside out...
...Ives' Christmas, Hijuelos has returned to the memory-pattern narrative technique of The Mambo Kings, honed and tightened into a 200-page masterpiece...
...Hijuelos's touch is not infallible, of course...
...The problem, however, is that this is just not the way in which memory actually works...
...When we recollect, we find ourselves leaping across years, events, people-making all sorts of strange jumps and associations...
...Santinio's old-world father in Our House in the Last World), the Cuban trumpeter Nestor Castillo, the movie actor Emilio O'Brien, and the ad-agency artist Ives...
...But the novel is also an incredibly rich, vibrant, alive claim for the possibility of having a moral self, for the possibility of being a man-a claim that life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly a mortal splendor...
...The novel of recollection, in which a character's memory plays nostalgically back over the whole of life, may have been a natural for Hijuelos...
...Ives' Christmas, as do thinly veiled references to his family's reception of Our House in the Last World...
...The dead, the German poet Rilke once claimed, do not need us as much as we need them...
...Who else writing today could do what Hijuelos does in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, presenting Lucille Ball's husband, Desi Arnaz, as Aristotle's great-souled man...
...The sad-happy, exuberant-melancholy fiction of Oscar Hijuelos has found in grief for the dead a path to the resurrection of the novel...
...There is also a surprising amount of bitterness in the book: some of the bitterness about the American immigrant-experience contemporary reviewers love, but also some oddly bitter references to being a fat child, having a checkered college career, and being thought the family failure...
...And six years later, with The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, the serious work arrived in an explosion...
...The novel ends in a scene nearly impossible to believe is appearing in a work of contemporary fiction, with Ives sitting in church, listening to "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring...
...In the first place, as thoughtful autobiogra-phers from St...
...They reappear, much less bitterly, in Mr...
...Born in 1951 in New York City to parents recently arrived from Cuba, Hijuelos typically sets his work in the Upper West Side neighborhoods in which he was raised...
...Augustine to Henry Adams have seen, the notion of a continuous self--existing from the first moment of life to the last- requires at the very least a sophisticated defense...
...In The Mambo Kings he occasionally indulges a sort of blank-verse cataloguing, as though to wow the writing-school crowd, and in all his novels he is tempted to show off an erudition that seems at times mugged-up for the occasion: Latin music in The Mambo Kings, photography in Emilio Montez O'Brien, cartoons and Dickens lore in Mr...
...Vaguely chronological, but ordered more by the strange for-ward-and-back segues and elisions of memory, Cesar's recollections jump from recording sessions with his brother, Nestor, to their appearance on I Love Lucy as Desi's "cousins from Havana," and back to the sad cantos of his childhood...
...Perhaps a little too deliberately, a little too self-consciously "exuberant-and-full-of-life"-as though Hijuelos, now established as a major talent, felt the need to measure himself against the Jorge Amado or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez style of Latin American magic realism...
...that we exist under a law which demands nothing less from us than our death...
...In a time in which most novelists who are religious believers seem either apologetic or belligerent about their faith, Oscar Hijuelos has written a novel in which Catholicism appears as something simple and dignified, entirely possible for a man to believe-neither mocked nor exalted as some "ethnic" idiosyncrasy, but simply a serious way of life...
...These may not be autobiographical elements, but they read like the demons and obstructive memories young writers often have to write out before they can move on to their serious work...
...After graduation from City College, he worked for an advertising agency in Manhattan while writing his first novel, the 1984 Our House in the Last World (still in print, like all the other novels...
...J. Bottum, associate editor of First Things, is a frequent contributor of literary essays to THE 'WEEKLY STANDARD...
...In the end the author must resort to ghosts and dream sequences in order to bring his conclusion home and resolve for his generation the loss of the Cuba their parents knew...
...The story of the Santinios, a family of immigrants from Cuba's Oriente Province to New York in the 1940s, Our House in the Last World won the prestigious Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received widespread, flattering reviews...
...that grief and loss are what give us shape and meaning...
...He laughed, remembering how the slightest breeze from the church's open doors, rustling the altar's cloth, had made Ives' little heart jump: at any moment, Jesus would be coming out of His resting place and the world would be filled with miracles...
...Ives' Christmas (HarperCollins, 248 pages, $23) are more than merely homage to the greatest of Christmas storytellers...
...Sweeping through the whole of the 20th century, tracing the lives and loves of the 15 children of a small-town Pennsylvania photographer and movie-projectionist named Nelson O'Brien and his Cuban wife, Mariela Montez, the 500-page novel is exuberant and full of life...
...Ives' wife] told him, "You have to put it behind you, my love," but as the years passed, nearly thirty of them, with their thousands of days and hundreds of thousands of hours, he still could not get a certain image out of his head: his righteous and good son, stretched out on the sidewalk, eyes glazed and looking upward, suddenly aware and saddened that his physical life was ending, that image coming to Ives again and again...
...Suddenly the author of a good but conventional first novel becomes the author of a new-found classic like Mr...
...In his hands, the novel of recollection becomes again a way to record the significance of life, capable of bearing again the weight of characters' religious faith, moral reflection, and sense of truth...
...Despite his animated prose, he portrays sorrow very well, and his strongest gift may be his power to present naturally melancholy men like the poet and failed businessman Teodoro Sorrea (Mrs...
...But with it, Hijuelos-author of last year's Mr...
...It is also a profound use of an adult's memory of childhood faith to arrive at a second, and fully adult, faith...
...But though the novelistic device of recollection may have been a natural choice for Hijuelos, it is also a device that novelists have been using for some time to assert the end of the traditional novel of the moral self moving through time...
...Despite being urged to put the murder behind him by his friends-even that he allow them to kill the murderer-Ives eventually enters into correspondence with his son's killer, whom he at last visits and forgives...
...Ives' Christmas and the 1990 Pulitzer prize-winner The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love- has completely subverted the contemporary novel of recollection...
...More to the point, who else writing in America today still believes in the possibility of great-souled men, or has a literary technique that could do more than mock or demean them...
...Hijuelos represents our best chance in these late times to have a Dickens, to have a novelist who is both very popular and very goodin short, to have a classic novelist among us...
...Though Ives's memories range throughout the fields of his life, however, they always eventually come home to the murdered son...
...With his fourth and most recent novel, however, Mr...
...The very things that led to its critical recognition, however, are also the reasons Our House in the Last World is at last flawed, recognizable in retrospect as apprentice work (though of a high order...
...But, first with The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and then with Mr...
...But he has a precise eye for visual detail, and, in Mr...
...This is nearly perfect prose and orthodox theology-with perhaps even a nod toward the Holy Saturday speculations of Hans Urs von Balthasar (the Swiss cardinal who has become probably the most influential Catholic theologian of the late 20th century...
...Neither the passive power by which memories are recorded, nor the semi-passive power by which we float or stroll through our memories, is the active faculty by which we make stories from our lives...
...The loss of Cuba, too, helps his work-not only in the melancholy romanticizing of the old world that is a staple of fiction by the children of immigrants, but in a second loss in which Castro's dictatorship closed that world forever...
...The repeated nods toward Charles Dickens in Mr...
...With pained but transcendent eyes, bearded and regal, He would come down the central aisle toward Ives, and placing His wounded hands upon Ives' brow, give His blessing before taking him away, and all others who were good in this world, off into His heaven, with its four mysterious winds, where they would be joined unto Him and all that is good forever and ever, without end...
...The story of an elderly and dying Cuban musician, Cesar Castillo-who, with a case of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes, checks into a run-down New York hotel and settles down to die-the novel swirls out in a series of reminiscences about Cuba, New York, and the Mambo craze of the late 1940s...
...Retrospective stories allow the use of a first-person, past-tense narration that mimics autobiography, and allow a kind of eavesdropping in which, through memory, adults overhear with understanding what as children they heard without understanding...
...And with this technique, this almost photographic imagery, Hijuelos finds the answer...
...that the good man, when he gathers himself to die, looks back not with shame but with that sweet sorrow of memory for which the English word "nostalgia" is a pale approximation...
...He would be dressed in great flowing white robes, a beautiful light filling the church...
...For modern writers losing confidence in fiction's moral hero and the natural truth of narrative-Virginia Woolf shows it happening in To the Lighthouse-the problems of the novel of recollection suddenly become the solution...
...The major events of Ives's life gradually emerge in the novel: his work as an artist in a Manhattan ad agency, his adoption from an orphanage by a well-to-do New York printer, his perhaps baseless guess of Hispanic descent (and gradual assumption of a certain old-fashioned Hispanic formality), his marriage to an Irish Catholic girl from a family of blue-collar policemen, his work in the neighborhood and parish, his deep and serious Catholic faith...
...Hijuelos's main themes were in place even in this first effort: deep nostalgia for the lost world of his parents' pre-Castro Cuba, joy in his minute knowledge of Manhattan, clear vision of the class distinctions (some newborn in America, some carried over from the old country) within immigrant neighborhoods...
...Oscar Hijuelos has made the most new-fangled sort of novel assert the most old-fashioned sort of moral truth...
...Cesar remembers Cuba when he was young and unknown, New York when he was young and almost famous, and New York again when he was old and mostly forgotten...
...To read his four books is to feel a mad exhilaration utterly at odds with their nostalgic, elegiac tone...
...Built of short, two- or three-page chapters, the novel presents a series of crystal-hard memories (most set near Christmas) on which Ives has been meditating ever since his son Robert was gunned down in 1967, a few weeks before he was to enter the Franciscan seminary in preparation for the priesthood...
...For a Victorian writer confident about the existence of the moral self and the natural structuring of life as a story-think of Charles Dickens and David Copperfield- recollection offers great advantages...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 33
