Living in the shadows of America

In his varied career, Dagoberto Gilb has given voice to the marginalized and advocated for a more accurate and ample Chicano literary history. Currently a professor in the creative writing program at Texas State University, he is the editor of the weighty “Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature” (2006). His own work first came to national attention in 1993, when his short-story collection “The Magic of Blood” was published to great acclaim and went on to win the PEN/Hemingway Award. Gilb’s bleak first novel, “The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna” (1994), set in the Southwest, was a New York Times Notable Book.

In Europe, Gilb’s work is considered a lens on multicultural America. His essay collection, “Gritos,” (2003), written over a period of 20 years, includes an unforgettable piece titled “Mi Mommy,” first published in the New Yorker as “I Knew She Was Beautiful,” in which Gilb describes a reunion with his once movie star-gorgeous mother on her deathbed.

The gut-wrenching essay presages Gilb’s second novel, “The Flowers,” the tale of a lost boy in an unnamed city not unlike Los Angeles.

Sonny Bravo tells his own story. The 15-year-old Chicano’s mastery of Spanish is limited, but his Spanglish sizzles. To imagine the adult he wants to become, he teaches himself French. It’s not tainted by the prejudices that abound close to home. Gilb juxtaposes lean, hard-boiled prose with more lyrical passages seeking to pin down ephemeral adolescent emotions. Sonny likes to close his eyes and see with his ears. His mother’s telephone conversations tend to be about men and betrayal: “So I tried to never listen. I made it go black inside my head, and then words, when she’d make them, were these shapes that wormed around, spraying light that would disappear into a hole that was bigger than any room I been in.”

Not since James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” has the unspoken so crackled with sexual tension. Lyrical passages don’t always ring as true, but Gilb’s dialogue, working class and downbeat, is inspired. When Sonny and his contemporaries converse in combo -- Spanish and English as one -- poetry emerges.

Sonny Bravo’s mother, Silvia, is physical perfection. She brings men to their knees. Motherhood isn’t her long suit. For as long as he can remember, Sonny has fed and clothed himself. Silvia is rarely home and likes a good party. When one of the men she jilts nearly kills her boy, she quickly marries a brawny, widowed construction boss. Her new husband, Cloyd Longpre, a pomade-wearing Okie, owns an apartment building he calls Los Flores. On a sign, floodlit from below, the name is surrounded by wrought-iron daisies. Cloyd doesn’t know that Los Flores means “the Flores family,” not “the flowers.” With a nod and a wink, Gilb indicates that the building’s motley occupants are one big American family: undocumented Mexicans, Mexican Americans, negros, blancos -- that over-broad category of people called white.

In one of the novel’s more haunting images, Sonny seems to fade into the paraphernalia that defines his room. Once occupied by Cloyd’s now adult son, the room is an interior decorator’s nightmare. It’s stuffed to the gills. Sonny can barely manage to sleep under the red-checkered bedspread he considers culturally offensive. He doesn’t touch the fishing pole, the pennants from national parks he’s never seen or the Boy Scout camping books of another era. “[W]hy bother when I wasn’t going to be here that long, so I liked them there for proof I wasn’t staying.”

Cloyd loves tacos and his “cute little Mexican gal.” His palate doesn’t recognize that Silvia’s salsa is store-bought. A sentimental drunk who wants his stepson to bond with him by hating blacks, Cloyd is focused on preparing for the day when “they” invade. The Okie doesn’t notice that one of his tenants, nicknamed Pink, is an African American albino. Pink, drawn with authorial finesse, serves as chorus in this sometimes Oedipal tragedy. He hints at the future and makes you laugh. He understands Sonny as only another invisible person can.

Sonny spends his days doing janitorial chores around the building, and the plot -- what there is of one -- seems to rise out of the boy’s subconscious. Gilb does a good job of keeping the reader a few steps ahead of his unreliable narrator. As he sweeps, literally, through the other tenants’ lives, handsome Sonny is drawn to pristine Nica, who is everything his mother is not. Virginal yet maternal, she’s too good for Sonny to touch, and he finds himself seduced by married Cindy. Feeling robbed of his dignity when Cindy isn’t sexually satisfied, Sonny looks around for something to steal. When Nica is accused of taking some money he has pocketed, Sonny is determined to save her. He buys her a bus ticket back to the rural Mexican poverty she has already escaped once as an illegal immigrant. As he ponders his future, long-simmering riots break out, and the mythical city begins to burn. Silvia’s Sonny is headed “a la madre,” which is Spanish street lingo for “to hell.” It could be L.A. -- or anywhere.

Soledad Santiago is a journalist and the author of several novels, including “Streets of Fire” and “Room 9.”