In Search of Snow: A Novel - Hardcover

Urrea, Luis Alberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060170891 ISBN 13: 9780060170899

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1994

Synopsis

In a novel set against the multicultural backdrop of Arizona in the mid-1950s, Mike McGurk journeys from one unlikely adventure to another as he searches for love and the meaning of life, accompanied by prizefighter-turned-mechanic Bobo Garcia. A first novel. $20,000 ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author

Luis Alberto Urrea taught expository writing at Harvard.

Reviews

Urrea wrests strange, beautiful poetry out of a mean, lean desert terrain--Arizona, mid-1950s--in this impressive first novel, a blend of deadpan humor, picaresque adventure and search for self. Home for Mike McGurk is a gas station run by his widower father, Wallace (aka Texaco Turk) McGurk, an ornery bigot whose glory days as bare-knuckles boxing champ and WW II hero are behind him. Mike, age 27, is adrift; haunted by the memory of his mother, who died when he was seven, he has a guilt-ridden affair with his college-bound cousin Lily and then gets mixed up with Ramses Castro, a roughneck Apache gang leader. When Texaco Turk dies, Mike is rescued by Bobo Garcia, the Mexican-American mechanic. Their peripatetic adventures end in Bobo's hometown, where Mike, informally adopted into the Garcia family, comes to terms with his feelings about his macho father. Some of the novel's strongest scenes are the early depictions of Mike and his father, whose bluster is a veneer to hide his own sense of failure. Equally moving are Bobo's flashbacks to Buchenwald, where he helped liberate inmates of the Nazi concentration camp. Author of a nonfiction book on the Mexican border ( Across the Wire ), Urrea brings the glint of truth to his fictional characters and settings. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Urrea, whose collection of nonfiction vignettes about Mexicans living near the California border (Across the Wire, 1993) appeared last year, here fictionalizes similar material with uneven results. This is a tale of Mexican and American friendship: beginning in hatred, it transverses in a few months more pitfalls than most people experience in a lifetime and ends in a familial bond. Mike McGurk's mother died when he was seven. His father, an amateur wrestler, runs a gas station in Arizona. Turk's idea of a good time is trading four-letter insults with his son. To get a better sense of this quirky dysfunctional family that had ``no word for love,'' take the example of Turk lying about his 16-year-old son's age so Mike can enlist in WW II, then being horrified that the boy didn't kill a damn Kraut. Somewhere, amid all this, Mike becomes extremely sensitive. At 28, when he meets his rich, attractive cousin, he's fairly inexperienced sexually. These brief, magnificently written chapters are the perfect form to depict such trivialities. But Urrea's on more tenuous ground when minor incidents become picayune (getting beat up because you hate lima beans or discoursing on what a job it is when cotton shirts get wrinkles). While aiming for a comic effect, he inadvertently turns his characters into dolts. Emotionally potent scenes, such as when Mike goes home with Bobo and stays with his Mexican friend's family, deteriorate into slapstick. But there are also passages of unspoiled emotion: Mike busy in the kitchen while his father dies in the living room; Bobo's memories of WW II and sense of helplessness when he came upon the remains of Buchenwald. Despite vivid descriptions, the poetic language takes readers one step away instead of thrusting them into the thick of the action. There's plenty going on here; what's lacking is a narrative frame. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Urrea's first novel--he is the author of the nonfiction work Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (Doubleday, 1992)--deals with the delayed coming of age of 29-year-old Mike McGurk. Mike and his father Turk run a gas station in an Arizona small town in the 1950s. The domineering and combative Turk, an amateur boxer, is unable to express emotion and refuses to discuss the death of his wife. Mike, who lost his mother when he was seven, yearns for love and has a brief affair with his cousin Lily. After his father dies fighting a much younger man, Mike is forced to make his own choices and forms a friendship with Bobo, a Mexican American mechanic who likes to rescue people. Although his plot occasionally gets away from him, Urrea has crafted a touching and interesting story rich in memorable characterizations and sense of place.
- Harriet Gottfried, NYPL
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the late 1950s, in the desert outside Phoenix, the few human inhabitants of the area pass the time feuding: the whites hate the Mexicans and vice versa, and the Apaches hate them both. Owner of a desolate Texaco station, Turk McGurk and his son, Mike, daydream through the long, hot, uneventful days until Turk's decision to fight a much younger man leads to unexpected changes for all. Urrea's novel aims solidly at the wild southwestern genre: his writing is rowdy and imagistic; the characters are bound to and by nothing, especially convention; and the odd and whimsical thought or action is de rigueur. The most touching moments, however--Turk finally confessing his love for Mike's mother, long dead, or a young girl's crush on Mike--are rivaled by such jarringly unlikely ones as the elderly Native American Mr. Sneezy's preference for the company of Mike and his pal Bobo over his own family, in large part because they're planning a trip to Disneyland. The many off-key, often unbelievable elements, however, do not mar an exuberantly written first novel. Eloise Kinney

Edition details

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060170891
• ISBN 13: 9780060170899
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 258