Synopsis
The author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love continues his portrait of America through the eyes of immigrants with the story of an intensely feminine Cuban-Irish family and its one doggedly masculine son. 75,000 first printing. $75,000 ad/promo.
Reviews
Hijuelos's second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love , won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and was a crossover sensation. His depiction of two Cuban brothers making music in New York City was hailed both for its intimate knowledge of immigrant life and for its unrestrained celebration of carnal delights. Here, Hijuelos has taken his trademark concerns--the travails of cultural assimilation and the wonders of the flesh--to extraordinary lengths, with mixed results. In a style that combines the exuberance of Garcia Marquez with the dogged genealogies of Oscar Lewis's La Vida , Hijuelos tells of the Montez O'Brien family of Cobbleton, Pa. Nelson O'Brien, an Irishman, meets Mariela Montez while he is fighting the Spaniards in her native Cuba in 1898. They fall in love and marry; Nelson embarks on a career as a photographer and moviehouse manager, and sires 15 children--14 daughters and one son, Emilio. Unfortunately, Hijuelos is unable to bring the huge family to life. Instead, he falls back upon a single observation--that the overwhelmingly female household exudes a feminine allure powerful enough to pull a circus pilot and his plane right out of the air, as happens in the book's opening scene. This magic realism (monarch butterflies and flocks of birds follow the sisters around) grows wearying after continued deployment, and the sexual coquettishness within the family (one sister suckles Emilio, another pines for his "barbed masculinity") borders on the deviant. The Montez O'Briens are followed from the Depression through the two world wars and Vietnam, and then up to the present, but this immigrant tale seems unnaturally beatific: Emilio goes to Hollywood, three sisters headline in New York nightclubs; another is a psychic; yet another sends a child to Yale. The predominant struggles are with love, and the ultimate consolations are in family. Unable to rope this sprawling brood into purposeful direction, Hijuelos loses his grip on the story, with a formal omniscient narration overwhelming what at times seems to be the older sister Margarita's point of view. Despite Hijuelos's matchless, soaring prose, the novel, like the poor airman, cannot stay aloft.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Hijuelos's fluency--whether seamlessly singing the sad ballad of a family harrowed by madness and displacement in his first novel, Our House in the Last World (1985), or the slightly happier, warmer, more infectious up-tempo one of the Pulitzer-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)--is his signature, and here he gives it a very, very long solo in a family chronicle that follows a huge Irish-Cuban family across the span of a century. The very title here speaks of muchness, and muchness is delivered--but much, disappointingly, about very little. The eponymous brother is a 1950's B-movie actor who hits the rocks, a pattern of modest success without hope of permanence that began with his Irish-born photographer father and Cuban poetess mother. The Montez O'Briens grow up in a small Pennsylvania town, and Hijuelos follows them out and back--to Cuba, New York, Hollywood, Alaska, Ireland--as they make do individually and together. But as often imperils such a feckless, loose-woven, overly charactered book, Hijuelos pretty quickly gives up trying to invest each sibling with the same detailed attention, focusing instead on the patrician eldest sister, Margarita--a woman of innate dignity and poise--and leaving the rest to serve as mere counterpoints. What Hijuelos seems to want to do more intently is write lyrically, and he does. Sometimes it's good lyricism--as in Mambo Kings, Hijuelos writes about sex with just the right amount of dirty relish and melody--and sometimes it's awful, plunging to the novice level: ``In his sisters' company, he'd experience a sensation of pure happiness and it would seem that everything around them emanated from those females, the world itself a fertile living thing, the earth beneath them humming with its unseen life....'' A family chronicle can manage to achieve both harmony and individuality- -Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall is an example--but it takes a concentration of imagination that Hijuelos hasn't engaged here. Fat but flat. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Hijuelos, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love , has written a beautiful pastorale, loosely based on the idea of the limited text implied by photographs, in which the lives of 17 characters are developed. From the early 1900s to the 1980s, the Montez O'Brien family lives in a small town in Pennsylvania. As the title suggests, the family consists of an Irish father, Cuban mother, 14 daughters, and one son. Hijuelos interweaves their individual lives and loves, as in a family photo album, but reserves the fullest treatment for the eldest daughter, mother, father, and only son, who becomes a B-movie star and befriends, among others, Errol Flynn. Sexual liaisons play an important role, and Hijuelos composes women's stories with a loving hand. Readers looking for a strong plot and the urban sensibility of Hijuelos's earlier books will be disappointed; those whose interest is good writing will enjoy themselves. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/92.
- Harold Augen braum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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