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jennyshank's review against another edition
5.0
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/dagoberto_gilbs_the_flowers/C39/L39/
Dagoberto Gilbâs âThe Flowersâ
By Jenny Shank, 2-22-08
The Flowers
by Dagoberto Gilb
Grove Press
250 pages, $24
With his new novel The Flowers, Austin-based Dagoberto Gilb has written his most powerful book to date, digging his hands into the fraught subject of race relations, but doing so in his signature humorous, meandering, natural way that makes him such a winning chronicler of Western urban life. Although Gilbâs story alights on all kinds of touchy topicsâracism, illegal immigration, womenâs roles, sex, and drugsâhe never lectures. Instead, he creates a complex tableau of humanity that allows readers a fascinating glimpse into the sort of lives they may have wondered about. Gilbâs narrator, a 15-year-old Mexican-American named Sonny Bravo, speaks in a distinctive patois that mixes in the lax English grammar of teenagers ("anyways"), Spanish ("QuĂ© guapo es my little man!"), and even some French, which Sonny is studying as a lark. The result is an inventive language that sounds like that of todayâs YouTubed American youth.
As The Flowers begins, with Sonny describing his habitual thievery and his unmarried motherâs romantic troubles that spill over into his life, itâs hard to tell where the story heading, but itâs so entertaining, peopled with such colorful characters, that you donât care if itâs going to go anywhere or not. I had settled into enjoy the book as I did Gilbâs first novel, 1994âs The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, expecting great set pieces and description, but no real pyrotechnics out of the plot, but the plot of The Flowers becomes increasingly gripping and does provide fireworks before the end.
After a string of bad boyfriends, one of whom attacked Sonny, Sonnyâs beautiful mom, Sylvia, decides to marry a white guy named Cloyd Longpre (whom Sonny comes to refer to as âThe Cloyd"), a man who takes pride in displaying the mounted heads of animals heâs shot. Sonny suffers from half-neglect ("âŠmy mom, if she wasnât at her job, was out on dates and whatever"), and has grown accustomed to making his own dinner and keeping his own company.
But with his momâs marriage to The Cloyd, Sonny is uprooted to Los Flores, the apartment building that Longpre manages. (As Sonny figures out, it should properly be called âLas Flores,â and this funny detail reminded me of a character in a novel the protagonist of Mickey Acuña reads, who is misnamed Consuela instead of Consuelo.) Sonnyâs mom begins to cook a little, something sheâs never done before, and Sonny is expected to perform chores around the building, such as sweeping, painting, and taking out trash. He does the tasks biddably, with the sort of ironic âyes sirâ show of respect to Longpre that teenagers so delight in.
Just as Mickey Acuña focused on the daily life of the inhabitants of a YMCA, much of the action in The Flowers centers around the mundane activities of the residents of Los Flores. Except that they turn out to not be so mundane. From Pink, a jive-talking used car salesman who is rumored to be an albino African-American, to the nerdish Mexican-American twins that Sonny befriends at school, to Nica, an innocent Mexican immigrant girl whose parents donât allow to attend school or leave the apartment, each of Gilbâs characters are vivid and fresh.
Gilbâs narrators remind me of a more macho version of Baudelaireâs flĂąneur, a âgentleman stroller of city streets,â taking his time, observing the people around him. But in The Flowers, simmering tensions in the community and myriad temptations (such as a scantily clad young wife named Cindy who is bored at home and seeks Sonnyâs attentions, and money that Sonny discovers in Longpreâs office) draw Sonny out of his observer stance and cause him to take decisive action.
Gilbâs off-kilter humor is a key delight of The Flowers, demonstrating a perspective that is youthful enough to be believably that of a 15-year-old boy, but also a wisdom beyond Sonnyâs years. In once scene, Sonny explains why he starts buying his meals at a nearby bowling alley rather than eat at home. âI hated deer meat and will always hate deer meat. Cloyd food. Another time was fish. I pretended to get sick on that, which in a way wasnât hard because this fish had an eye staring up at me from the plate. Like the deer, he killed it, it was his--he was proud of that kind of shit.â
Gilbâs descriptions of urban life are visceral and evocative. Toward the end of the book, thereâs one very long, virtuosic paragraph that records Sonnyâs impressions of the passing traffic in a panoramic way. Itâs hard to convey its rhythm with a short excerpt, but hereâs a snippet:
âPeople were driving home with groceries, wanting hot dogs or ice cream or bananas or peanut butter or cookies or cereal. People were driving with beer and Quaaludes and whites and black beauties, wanting to have sex or watch it or talk about it, and people were snapping at kids in the backseat who were playing and happy, rolling the windows up and down and they were getting yelled at about food they ate or would eat or a toy they could have or lost, and people were driving with their husbands and wives and they werenât talking to each other, and old people were driving scared, afraid of every turn and stop like theyâd never been there before or maybe theyâd seen so many things they didnât know what to expect next.â
As much as Iâve enjoyed Gilbâs prior books, The Flowers tops them all, and represents a big leap forward in Gilbâs artistic growth.
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/an_interview_with_dagoberto_gilb/C39/L39/
WESTERN WRITERS
An Interview with Dagoberto Gilb
By Jenny Shank, 4-21-08
Photo by Nancy Crampton.
Dagoberto Gilb grew up in Los Angeles and moved frequently throughout the urban West that he depicts in stories and novels in his characteristic incisive and humorous way. After earning a masterâs degree from the University of California, Gilb worked for many years as a construction worker and carpenter in LA and El Paso. Gilb began publishing stories in literary magazines and eventually books, including 1994âs The Magic of Blood, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and 2003âs Gritos, an essay collection that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gilb currently is a professor at Texas State University, and recently published a new novel, The Flowers, which depicts life in an apartment complex as seen by the winning 15-year-old narrator, Sonny Bravo. I interviewed Gilb via email about the quirky characters and organic structure of the novel, and how writing and living in Texas influences his work.
New West You published your first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, in 1994, and since then have written successful essay and story collections. What prompted you to write a new novel?
Dagoberto Gilb: This is my fourth novel, even if it appears to be my second. Nobody needs prompting to write a novel. Maybe some mental and financial counseling and education.
NW: What are the unique challenges of writing a novel as opposed to a collection of shorter pieces?
DG: Some pieces are harder than others. The ones that seem the easiest are usually the hardest. Writers write what they need to write. I love writing short stories and essays too.
NW: The voice of Sonny Bravo is so arresting and inventive, with its humor and multilingual teenage flair. In some ways, itâs similar to the voice youâve used in other works, but in other ways itâs unique. How did you come up with the way heâd talk?
DG: Never used that voice before. It was the long work of the book, to carry a voice that was as âyoungâ in the past as it might be hearing it now and yet not only.
NW: Sonny decides to teach himself French, and uses French words that he likes the sound of in conversations. Why did you decide to have him do this?
DG: He needs to play. I need to play. He uses it to say, like, focque vous, to make himself smile, to lighten the darkness. For me itâs an inside joke about loving Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet. My frenchez vous to all the internal and external expectations of Mexican American literature to be only about retaining Spanish, and so on. The book, like all Genetâs, is about breaking rules and being confined both, and I tried to break as many rules of expectation, and the rest, as was possible, while maintaining a storyline.
NW: The cast of characters in âThe Flowersâ is so vivid, from Sonnyâs nerdish twin friends, to âThe Cloyd,â to Sonnyâs beautiful, self-focused mother. How did you create these people?
DG: I say I write from physical experience, not just musings or opinions or prescriptions. That is, I run or get into something and there is, call it, a throbbing. I focus on it and I write about that. The characters resemble people Iâve dreamed, re-invented, re-imagined, re-designed, made mythic in a ârealisticâ setting. The twins are my comedic Greek chorus. A novel is like a psychic map.
NW: Many writers start out writing from a young personâs perspective, and eventually write more from adult perspectives. If Iâm not mistaken, most of your earlier work is from the perspectives of adults, and your most recent book is from the perspective of a teenager. Do you have any thoughts on why you decided to write from a younger perspective at this point in your career?
DG: Sure, Sonny is fifteen years old. But this character is a fictional artifice, just as a woman writer might make her lead character a homosexual man, a male writer a woman in the Weather Underground. I did not intend him to be only fifteen, the book would not be read by anyone fifteen. That is to say, for me there is nothing younger or older in perspective from my work except in terms of the historical time frame of my own life. That is, the point of view of this novel is certainly not younger than any of the writing I did which preceded it.
NW: The structure of âThe Flowersâ seems pretty organicâthe plot arises out of the relationships between the characters, and it doesnât seem like you rush it. Did you plan out what would happen before you wrote it, or did the story come to you as you were working?
DG: I write to the ending I know, which is where my stories come from. The work is to know where to start and why there.
NW: Why did you decide to have the book culminate in a race riot?
DG: That was toward the ending I knew it was going to. And, I say, where this kind of story has to go.
NW: Some reviews have said that the skirmishes you include in The Flowers were from the L.A. riots of 1992, but you donât indicate this specifically. Did you have a specific place and time in mind?
DG: The only reviewer who said this was the one in the New York Times Book Review (she also judged me, with equal and more slandering inaccuracy, as a literary âstereotyperâ of women, like that, not considering that the male characters have an equivalent set of troubled adjectives, which those who arenât projecting their own stereotyping prejudice might recognize as the social backdrop of The Flowers). Though it is not brought up in the book for both willful âartyâ reasons (maybe dumb!) and also for what I thought was the novelâs internal demand, anyone whoâs from Los Angeles neighborhoods would recognize the â65 Watts Riot, which it is, and, of course, is not. I didnât want this to be considered a âhistoricalâ novel, so I admit that it weirdly pleases me that itâs not clearly recognizedâitâs not necessary to know. Exactly what I wanted, for better or worse.
NW: What was the process of editing Hecho in Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature? Did you have any revelations from what you uncovered to include in the anthology, and are there any pieces that particularly influenced you?
DG: I wrote the long answer to this in its introductory essay, which can be read here.
In the essay, Gilb writes, among other things, about his different responses to the work of LuĂs Valdez and Rolando Hinojosa: âIf Valdez was creating a Califas of archetypes (and sometimes stereotypes), of hip zoot suiters and lowriders, pachucos y las rucas, characters I enjoyed but didnât feel were like me and my more conflicted, and ordinary American experience, what I found in Hinojosaâs work bled a vein: He was writing about the common people who were cops or menial bank workers, employed at drugstores or who sold cars, went to little league baseball games and told stories of a living Mexico and the smallest cositas of a local community, like death and birth, who married who inside the community and out, much of it related as gossip and through simple conversation in dialogue. It was, in other words, what I recognized, and so, like much else that suddenly changed in my life from that point on, I began to understand the world I was in too, where I was not only as a working man, but as a writer I wanted to be.â
NW: You have traveled all over the country, teaching at various writing programs, and in recent years youâve been back in Texas, which is one of the states in which you grew up. Is it good for your writing to be in Texas? How does the place where you live affect what you write about?
DG: I have traveled a lot by standards of my childhood peers. I have now taught at a few universities. Much of my life now I have lived in Texas, though many adult years I worked as a construction worker mostly in Los Angeles, where I was born and raised. I think place and workâexperienceâare a writerâs dyes. For me, these are as important as parents and class and heritage. They set the story and bind the material. I have been a writer from the West, the American Southwest, and, like it or not, itâs who I will probably always be.
Dagoberto Gilbâs âThe Flowersâ
By Jenny Shank, 2-22-08
The Flowers
by Dagoberto Gilb
Grove Press
250 pages, $24
With his new novel The Flowers, Austin-based Dagoberto Gilb has written his most powerful book to date, digging his hands into the fraught subject of race relations, but doing so in his signature humorous, meandering, natural way that makes him such a winning chronicler of Western urban life. Although Gilbâs story alights on all kinds of touchy topicsâracism, illegal immigration, womenâs roles, sex, and drugsâhe never lectures. Instead, he creates a complex tableau of humanity that allows readers a fascinating glimpse into the sort of lives they may have wondered about. Gilbâs narrator, a 15-year-old Mexican-American named Sonny Bravo, speaks in a distinctive patois that mixes in the lax English grammar of teenagers ("anyways"), Spanish ("QuĂ© guapo es my little man!"), and even some French, which Sonny is studying as a lark. The result is an inventive language that sounds like that of todayâs YouTubed American youth.
As The Flowers begins, with Sonny describing his habitual thievery and his unmarried motherâs romantic troubles that spill over into his life, itâs hard to tell where the story heading, but itâs so entertaining, peopled with such colorful characters, that you donât care if itâs going to go anywhere or not. I had settled into enjoy the book as I did Gilbâs first novel, 1994âs The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, expecting great set pieces and description, but no real pyrotechnics out of the plot, but the plot of The Flowers becomes increasingly gripping and does provide fireworks before the end.
After a string of bad boyfriends, one of whom attacked Sonny, Sonnyâs beautiful mom, Sylvia, decides to marry a white guy named Cloyd Longpre (whom Sonny comes to refer to as âThe Cloyd"), a man who takes pride in displaying the mounted heads of animals heâs shot. Sonny suffers from half-neglect ("âŠmy mom, if she wasnât at her job, was out on dates and whatever"), and has grown accustomed to making his own dinner and keeping his own company.
But with his momâs marriage to The Cloyd, Sonny is uprooted to Los Flores, the apartment building that Longpre manages. (As Sonny figures out, it should properly be called âLas Flores,â and this funny detail reminded me of a character in a novel the protagonist of Mickey Acuña reads, who is misnamed Consuela instead of Consuelo.) Sonnyâs mom begins to cook a little, something sheâs never done before, and Sonny is expected to perform chores around the building, such as sweeping, painting, and taking out trash. He does the tasks biddably, with the sort of ironic âyes sirâ show of respect to Longpre that teenagers so delight in.
Just as Mickey Acuña focused on the daily life of the inhabitants of a YMCA, much of the action in The Flowers centers around the mundane activities of the residents of Los Flores. Except that they turn out to not be so mundane. From Pink, a jive-talking used car salesman who is rumored to be an albino African-American, to the nerdish Mexican-American twins that Sonny befriends at school, to Nica, an innocent Mexican immigrant girl whose parents donât allow to attend school or leave the apartment, each of Gilbâs characters are vivid and fresh.
Gilbâs narrators remind me of a more macho version of Baudelaireâs flĂąneur, a âgentleman stroller of city streets,â taking his time, observing the people around him. But in The Flowers, simmering tensions in the community and myriad temptations (such as a scantily clad young wife named Cindy who is bored at home and seeks Sonnyâs attentions, and money that Sonny discovers in Longpreâs office) draw Sonny out of his observer stance and cause him to take decisive action.
Gilbâs off-kilter humor is a key delight of The Flowers, demonstrating a perspective that is youthful enough to be believably that of a 15-year-old boy, but also a wisdom beyond Sonnyâs years. In once scene, Sonny explains why he starts buying his meals at a nearby bowling alley rather than eat at home. âI hated deer meat and will always hate deer meat. Cloyd food. Another time was fish. I pretended to get sick on that, which in a way wasnât hard because this fish had an eye staring up at me from the plate. Like the deer, he killed it, it was his--he was proud of that kind of shit.â
Gilbâs descriptions of urban life are visceral and evocative. Toward the end of the book, thereâs one very long, virtuosic paragraph that records Sonnyâs impressions of the passing traffic in a panoramic way. Itâs hard to convey its rhythm with a short excerpt, but hereâs a snippet:
âPeople were driving home with groceries, wanting hot dogs or ice cream or bananas or peanut butter or cookies or cereal. People were driving with beer and Quaaludes and whites and black beauties, wanting to have sex or watch it or talk about it, and people were snapping at kids in the backseat who were playing and happy, rolling the windows up and down and they were getting yelled at about food they ate or would eat or a toy they could have or lost, and people were driving with their husbands and wives and they werenât talking to each other, and old people were driving scared, afraid of every turn and stop like theyâd never been there before or maybe theyâd seen so many things they didnât know what to expect next.â
As much as Iâve enjoyed Gilbâs prior books, The Flowers tops them all, and represents a big leap forward in Gilbâs artistic growth.
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/an_interview_with_dagoberto_gilb/C39/L39/
WESTERN WRITERS
An Interview with Dagoberto Gilb
By Jenny Shank, 4-21-08
Photo by Nancy Crampton.
Dagoberto Gilb grew up in Los Angeles and moved frequently throughout the urban West that he depicts in stories and novels in his characteristic incisive and humorous way. After earning a masterâs degree from the University of California, Gilb worked for many years as a construction worker and carpenter in LA and El Paso. Gilb began publishing stories in literary magazines and eventually books, including 1994âs The Magic of Blood, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and 2003âs Gritos, an essay collection that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gilb currently is a professor at Texas State University, and recently published a new novel, The Flowers, which depicts life in an apartment complex as seen by the winning 15-year-old narrator, Sonny Bravo. I interviewed Gilb via email about the quirky characters and organic structure of the novel, and how writing and living in Texas influences his work.
New West You published your first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, in 1994, and since then have written successful essay and story collections. What prompted you to write a new novel?
Dagoberto Gilb: This is my fourth novel, even if it appears to be my second. Nobody needs prompting to write a novel. Maybe some mental and financial counseling and education.
NW: What are the unique challenges of writing a novel as opposed to a collection of shorter pieces?
DG: Some pieces are harder than others. The ones that seem the easiest are usually the hardest. Writers write what they need to write. I love writing short stories and essays too.
NW: The voice of Sonny Bravo is so arresting and inventive, with its humor and multilingual teenage flair. In some ways, itâs similar to the voice youâve used in other works, but in other ways itâs unique. How did you come up with the way heâd talk?
DG: Never used that voice before. It was the long work of the book, to carry a voice that was as âyoungâ in the past as it might be hearing it now and yet not only.
NW: Sonny decides to teach himself French, and uses French words that he likes the sound of in conversations. Why did you decide to have him do this?
DG: He needs to play. I need to play. He uses it to say, like, focque vous, to make himself smile, to lighten the darkness. For me itâs an inside joke about loving Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet. My frenchez vous to all the internal and external expectations of Mexican American literature to be only about retaining Spanish, and so on. The book, like all Genetâs, is about breaking rules and being confined both, and I tried to break as many rules of expectation, and the rest, as was possible, while maintaining a storyline.
NW: The cast of characters in âThe Flowersâ is so vivid, from Sonnyâs nerdish twin friends, to âThe Cloyd,â to Sonnyâs beautiful, self-focused mother. How did you create these people?
DG: I say I write from physical experience, not just musings or opinions or prescriptions. That is, I run or get into something and there is, call it, a throbbing. I focus on it and I write about that. The characters resemble people Iâve dreamed, re-invented, re-imagined, re-designed, made mythic in a ârealisticâ setting. The twins are my comedic Greek chorus. A novel is like a psychic map.
NW: Many writers start out writing from a young personâs perspective, and eventually write more from adult perspectives. If Iâm not mistaken, most of your earlier work is from the perspectives of adults, and your most recent book is from the perspective of a teenager. Do you have any thoughts on why you decided to write from a younger perspective at this point in your career?
DG: Sure, Sonny is fifteen years old. But this character is a fictional artifice, just as a woman writer might make her lead character a homosexual man, a male writer a woman in the Weather Underground. I did not intend him to be only fifteen, the book would not be read by anyone fifteen. That is to say, for me there is nothing younger or older in perspective from my work except in terms of the historical time frame of my own life. That is, the point of view of this novel is certainly not younger than any of the writing I did which preceded it.
NW: The structure of âThe Flowersâ seems pretty organicâthe plot arises out of the relationships between the characters, and it doesnât seem like you rush it. Did you plan out what would happen before you wrote it, or did the story come to you as you were working?
DG: I write to the ending I know, which is where my stories come from. The work is to know where to start and why there.
NW: Why did you decide to have the book culminate in a race riot?
DG: That was toward the ending I knew it was going to. And, I say, where this kind of story has to go.
NW: Some reviews have said that the skirmishes you include in The Flowers were from the L.A. riots of 1992, but you donât indicate this specifically. Did you have a specific place and time in mind?
DG: The only reviewer who said this was the one in the New York Times Book Review (she also judged me, with equal and more slandering inaccuracy, as a literary âstereotyperâ of women, like that, not considering that the male characters have an equivalent set of troubled adjectives, which those who arenât projecting their own stereotyping prejudice might recognize as the social backdrop of The Flowers). Though it is not brought up in the book for both willful âartyâ reasons (maybe dumb!) and also for what I thought was the novelâs internal demand, anyone whoâs from Los Angeles neighborhoods would recognize the â65 Watts Riot, which it is, and, of course, is not. I didnât want this to be considered a âhistoricalâ novel, so I admit that it weirdly pleases me that itâs not clearly recognizedâitâs not necessary to know. Exactly what I wanted, for better or worse.
NW: What was the process of editing Hecho in Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature? Did you have any revelations from what you uncovered to include in the anthology, and are there any pieces that particularly influenced you?
DG: I wrote the long answer to this in its introductory essay, which can be read here.
In the essay, Gilb writes, among other things, about his different responses to the work of LuĂs Valdez and Rolando Hinojosa: âIf Valdez was creating a Califas of archetypes (and sometimes stereotypes), of hip zoot suiters and lowriders, pachucos y las rucas, characters I enjoyed but didnât feel were like me and my more conflicted, and ordinary American experience, what I found in Hinojosaâs work bled a vein: He was writing about the common people who were cops or menial bank workers, employed at drugstores or who sold cars, went to little league baseball games and told stories of a living Mexico and the smallest cositas of a local community, like death and birth, who married who inside the community and out, much of it related as gossip and through simple conversation in dialogue. It was, in other words, what I recognized, and so, like much else that suddenly changed in my life from that point on, I began to understand the world I was in too, where I was not only as a working man, but as a writer I wanted to be.â
NW: You have traveled all over the country, teaching at various writing programs, and in recent years youâve been back in Texas, which is one of the states in which you grew up. Is it good for your writing to be in Texas? How does the place where you live affect what you write about?
DG: I have traveled a lot by standards of my childhood peers. I have now taught at a few universities. Much of my life now I have lived in Texas, though many adult years I worked as a construction worker mostly in Los Angeles, where I was born and raised. I think place and workâexperienceâare a writerâs dyes. For me, these are as important as parents and class and heritage. They set the story and bind the material. I have been a writer from the West, the American Southwest, and, like it or not, itâs who I will probably always be.
pliego29's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
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