...clear eyed and fresh, full of sweet gravity and pensive humor...
...clear, straightforward and gripping...all of it is emotionally and culturally accurate...
Oscar Casares's Brownsville, everyone is so close, tucked up snug against the Rio Grande, that people's quarrels irresistibly spill into one another's lives, like the Mexican soap operas that beam into their TV sets. In ''Yolanda,'' a boy can't help overhearing the spats and erotic rapprochements next door between a young beauty and an older husband so jealous that he orders her to quit selling lipstick because it's ''putting ideas'' in her head. When she flees his ursine grasp (''even his fingers needed a haircut'') to hide in the 12-year-old's bed, it's only the logical extension of Brownsville intimacy. With a quiet mastery of the smallest detail, Casares puts us on neighborly terms with the locals. A baby walks ''like a little drunk man,'' a dog sniffs ''up the right leg and down the left, as if it were frisking a suspect,'' a slacker finds a monkey's head and fantasizes about their eternal boyish monkeyshines together, to stave off growing up and taking that security job at Amigoland Mall. The author makes us feel the loving mismatch between Brownsville, Tex., and Mexico: one immigrant character ''had tried to live his father's life, but now it felt as if he were standing in the middle of a river trying to stretch his arms and touch both sides. No matter what he did, he'd never reach far enough.'' Casares should reach beyond vignettes, but as for character, place and crisp lingo: so far, so good. — Tim Appelo
"I thought writing everything down on paper was a good way to defend myself," says the unnamed narrator of "RG," one of the nine stories in Casares's fine debut collection set in the Texas border town of Brownsville. "RG" is related by a Hispanic bread-truck driver whose Anglo neighbor borrowed his best hammer and didn't return it-for four years, which is how long the narrator, without knocking on his neighbor's door, has waited. In the funniest story in the collection, "Chango," an unemployed 31-year-old, Bony, living with his parents and subsisting on a steady diet of beers, finds a monkey head in his yard and begins to think of it as his buddy and mascot. Alas, his unsympathetic parents want him to throw it away. Bony's father, a police sergeant, is prone to sarcastic explosions: "(Estas loco o qu ? You want to live with monkeys, I'll drive you to the zoo. Come on, get in the car, I'll take you right now." The barking of a neighbor's dog drives Marcelo Torres, an agricultural agent, to drastic and fantastic measures in "Charro." With skill and economy, Casares evokes the easygoing, plainspoken, yet slightly stagy voice of the guy on the neighboring bar stool-or the nearby cubicle-describing his weekend ("Here's a piece of advice for you: If a guy named Jerry Fuentes comes knocking at your front door trying to sell you something, tell him you're not interested and then lock the door," warns the opening line of "Jerry Fuentes"). Probing underneath the surface of Tex-Mex culture, Casares's stories, with their wisecracking, temperamental, obsessive middle-aged men and their dramas straight from neighborhood gossip are in the direct line of descent from Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Ostensibly set in Brownsville, TX, these nine stories could easily have been located in any border town; the characters may be specific to a precise locale, but the themes and situations are universal. Like the people inhabiting these stories, who hasn't been awakened in the middle of the night by a barking dog, conned into buying something not really wanted, victimized by a jealous spouse, or distraught at lending a tool to a neighbor only to have it broken or, worse, never returned? One of the best of the lot is "Big Jesse, Little Jesse," a story of a broken marriage and disagreements over raising a handicapped son that will have a familiar ring for many. The details of the daily lives of the inhabitants of this microcosm are exquisite and delicious; one is less taken, however, with the characters, many of whom, especially the fathers, are less than likable. Nothing spectacular or extraordinary, this collection is simply well written and down-to-earth, featuring authentic re-creations of the Mexican American experience. Recommended.-Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Texan Casares debuts with nine stories about economic hardship and emotional resourcefulness in a cross-cultural zone straddling the US-Mexico border. The pieces here-set in Brownsville, way, way south in Lone Star country-are broken into three categories with individual titles in an attempt to make them work as groups, but it's a needless artifice. The opener ("Mr. Z") tells of a young boy's first job experience at a fireworks stand-an opportunity to lose economic innocence by giving away as many roman candles as he sells; "R.G." is about a man's intimate relationship with his hammer-his tools are his life-as he lends it to a better-off neighbor who promptly forgets the loan and comes to believe the hammer is his. In the next subgroup of stories we find "Domingo," who works in the yard of a well-off gringo lady and contemplates his hopeless state and dead daughter while yet managing to find grace and faith in labor. In the final group, "Jerry Fuentes" is the funeral salesman swindler who takes a young narrator and his wife for a ride; "Yolanda" is the beautiful neighbor in whose imagined arms a teenaged narrator finds hope of better times that aren't in the offing; and "Mrs. Perez" is an aging woman who finds meaning in a depressed world through bowling, of all things, and pride in her cherry-red ball that stands for fading allure. But what will happen when she witnesses the ball stolen before her very eyes and the thief turns out to be a relative? Casares's prose is crisp and efficient, but he relies too heavily on an expected sympathy for the disenfranchised, and one wishes that the Espa-ol we get here-meant to paint a truly Hispanic world-went beyond the first three weeks of Spanish101. Honor amid poverty from a still-growing voice.
