Latin Moon in Manhattan

by Jaime Manrique

 

Reviewed by Martin Kich

 

Ntozake Shange has compared this novel to Manuel Puig's Heartbreak Tango and G. Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers, suggesting that "the words sing saucily all the characters' revealed secrets in the hush of tangos and Columbian whispers in Queens."  Similarly, Oscar Hijuelos has praised Manrique's "exuberant and vivid voice," finding it "both entertaining and enriching," and he has asserted that Latin Moon in Manhattan "captures the urban rhythms and the diversity of the Latin world of New York."  Although the narrative voice is certainly engaging and often strikingly inventive, Manrique's novel lacks the complexity of conception and the density of development that make Puig's and Infante's achievements, and, therefore, Latin Moon in Manhattan offers something more than a caricature, but something much less than a richly varied, fully credible canvas of the cultural milieu it treats.

The novel's central character and narrator is Santiago Martinez, a poet stalled in his efforts to complete an epic on Christopher Columbus and, more mundanely, a translator at judicial appeals for disability payments from Social Security.  He is also gay, if inactively sexual; he loses his longest and dearest friend to AIDS, and his beloved, quirky tomcat is dying of an enlarged heart; he has an exile's tortured attachment to Columbia, though his exile is spiritual rather than political, and he has an adolescent's exasperated affection for his eccentric, indomitable mother, though his ambivalence toward her has become increasingly a comical adjunct to, rather than a critical element of, his ennui.  The early chapters of the novel vividly establish the tensions in these circumstances in some quietly remarkable set pieces.  For instance, several of the disability hearings are recorded in an almost documentary manner, wryly conveying the broad conjunction of the banal and the macabre--and bringing to mind the technique and the effect of the compelling lawyer-client prison interviews of John Gregory Dunne's Dutch Shea, Jr.. On the other hand, the transparent mix of social ambitions and cultural pretensions is highlighted in Santiago's forced induction into The Columbian Parnassus, a literary society consisting of three of his mother's friends; the satire here has all the concentrated but well-calibrated detailing found in Bruce Jay Friedman's early stories and novels.

Still, as the novel progresses, the reader is propelled less by the intrinsic interest provided by the characters and their situations, than by a thinly melodramatic rush of events and a parade of cardboard-cut-out grotesques.  For instance, through his nephew Gene, Santiago becomes involved in a double cross of Columbian drug traffickers and is rescued by a midget undercover cop, posing as a hooker and calling herself Hot Sauce; in the course of her undercover work, Hot Sauce falls in love with Santiago's friend Ben Ami Burztyn, a wealthy Venezuelan gourmand who is, in effect, an idiosyncratic, overbearing version of the British actor Sebastian Cabot; and, implausibly, against the backdrop of this Mutt-and-Jeff fantasy of erotic bliss, Santiago and Gene celebrate their safety, as if those arrested will be put away forever and have no "friends" interested in recovering the several pounds of stolen cocaine or in exacting revenge on the thieves.  In the end, the effect is similar to that of one of the lamer of Woody Allen's films or one of Joseph Heller's more recent novels:  the reader is left amused but, at best, only mildly engaged.  What the reader wants more of is a faith in the rich possibilities of "voice" exhibited in passages such as the following:  "[Santiago's mother] placed a tray of pork chicharrones on the table.  It's been fifty years since Gardel [a tango singer] died, she said dreamily, changing the subject, but for my money he sings better every day."