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 'Nobody's Son' is a mongrel masterpiece. By Jim Carvalho Nobody's Son: Notes From an American Life, by Luis Alberto Urrea (UA Press). Cloth, $19.95.
America--there's a Mexican in the woodpile.
Strictly autobiographical, Nobody's Son is a collection of seven pieces of non-fiction rendered in Urrea's inimitably raucous style. At turns hysterical and heartbreaking, all of the pieces are interesting; and two--"Tijuana Wonderland" and "Sanctuary"--are marvelous. Two others stand out because they stick out: "Down the Highway with Edward Abbey" is perhaps the best-written story in the collection, but its content doesn't fit the book's theme as well as the others. "Leaving Shelltown" fits the book's theme nicely, but is written as a series of journal entries and seems out of place stylistically. But I nit-pick. This a wonderful, thoughtful collection.
Urrea's bright, witty style makes me think of José Antonio
Burciaga (Drink Cultura, Spilling the Beans). Both
authors use a conversational style, but Urrea's a better writer.
Where Burciaga's cadences are awkward, Urrea's are mellifluous: When I was a boy, Tijuana was a place of magic and wonder, a place of dusty gardens laden with fruit, of pretty women, dogs, food, music. Everywhere you looked, there were secrets and astonishments. And everyone was laughing. I know nothing about Urrea's writing process, but his sentences and paragraphs read as if they flow naturally to the page in longhand, with little effort and little revision.
Abbey's comments "stuck a knife in my heart," Urrea says. But he still admires Abbey's writing and even sees some of the old curmudgeon in himself. Fellow author and friend Rudolfo Anaya, on the other hand, tells Urrea, "I hope you have four flat tires in the desert. I hope the car catches fire. I hope it burns to the ground." Anaya doesn't understand Edward Abbey. Urrea does. Parts of Nobody's Son inform Urrea's earlier work. The author's fine 1994 novel, In Search of Snow, contains a passage about the holocaust that seems to come out of nowhere. The new book fills us in on why the passage is important to Urrea: It's based on his mother's war experiences as a Red Cross volunteer, experiences that had a profound effect on her and her son.
In Nobody's Son, we also learn that In Search of Snow's
magical García household, so loving and boisterous and
wondrous that it seems too good to be true, is based on the adopted
household the author grew up in. After living in such an environment,
it's not so hard to see why Urrea, a white boy of mixed parentage,
would choose to call himself Chicano. Shoot. If I'd grown up there,
I'd call myself Chicano, too.
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Urrea tags himself Chicano. An odd choice, perhaps, considering
his pedigree. By the end of Nobody's Son, however, readers
will understand exactly why he chooses to label himself the way
he does. And why he understands that any ethnic label doesn't
do him justice.
Readers who've given up on authors who write from an ethnic perspective
because of the prevailing whininess in so much of that literature
will find Urrea's writing refreshing. Sure, he muddies the silly
English-only argument, reverses the blame in some instances of
aggression, and isn't above insulting the physical appearance
of some of the people with whom he disagrees. But neither is he
afraid to laugh at himself, criticize "his people,"
or break from the orthodoxy of victim ideology. In "Down
the Highway," (a version of which was first published in
the 