Spring speeds into summer here. No sooner do we take off our long sleeves than
we’re heading for Barton Springs. No matter. I don’t mind mixing spring
pleasures (flowers, falling in love again) with summer ones (fruit salad and
reading by the pool). The last three novels I’ve read share a similar
abundance. In the first, a picture of life falls from its frame onto the floor
in wreckage; in the second, a soothing balm of empathy and loving-kindness
rights a world turned upside-down; in the third, love neither conquers nor
divides – it just keeps on in its peculiar, blind path.
A Place Where the Sea Remembers by Sandra Benitez (Scribner, $10
paper), a novel of interconnected stories, reminds me of a silver puzzle
ring that relaxes into a little chain to play with and, when you’ve got to act
serious, folds up again into a ring. The novel concerns the lives of nine
characters who live in the small town of Santiago, Mexico, and how the
slightest move by one affects, in domino fashion, the rest. As with trying to
fit together the puzzle ring, it’s hard to know for certain where the story
starts: the day Candelario loses his job as el ensaladero (salad-maker)
at an expensive restaurant in the city because the customers point out that the
Caesar salad the restaurant owner has taught him to make is lacking key
ingredients? Or is it when Candelario’s wife Chayo lies to her sister, Marta,
who is pregnant and unwed, saying that since her husband lost his job he
decided they wouldn’t take the baby when it arrives? Or is it when Marta visits
Remedios, la curandera, to find an end to her troubles and a path to the
freedom of El Paso? As destiny plays itself out, we also meet a photographer
whose ride home with a gringo reveals the ignorance and fear each feels towards
the other; a school teacher whose life is nearly lost to the demands of his
selfish, elderly mother; a grieving fisherman and his son who together build a
roadside shrine to honor the family they lost; a man who works the beach with
his portable cage of birds that perform tricks and tell fortunes; and a midwife
who provides comfort and healing to anyone in the village in need. Finally, as
if standing in for the author’s power of creation in stringing together this
story of chance, loss, recovery, and fate, there is la curandera who
waits at the spot on the beach where someone was raped, poised to receive the
body of a boy who just that morning was swept by rushing water into the sea.
A Place Where the Sea Remembers is simple and daring, imaginative, and
political. Like a ring that is more than just a ring, it is fascinating for its
design, succeeds at more than one goal, and, most importantly, holds secrets
that matter.
The Unfastened Heart by Lane Von Herzen (Dutton, $19.95 hard) is
a most unusual novel, in which statues eat cake and weep, girls fly instead of
walk, and one can survive forever on chocolates and tears. With a style that
teeters on the edge of the magical realism made especially popular by the movie
Like Water For Chocolate, Von Herzen totters sometimes perilously close
to the overwrought and falls headlong into a sweetness that is just too sappy
for some. However, for those who tend to find the world too much with them
The Unfastened Heart offers a garden of unearthly delights in the
character of Anna, a long-suffering Martha Stewart of emotion, and her
daughter, the beatific Mariela. I wish I lived in the house next door to them
so I could enjoy Anna’s stellar cooking and cozy living room overgrown with
cages of cooing doves. Instead of me, there is the widower Clifford Ettinger,
and his son Addison, an aspiring writer. The chorus in this mock tragedy is
Anna’s special recovery group, the love-worn but good-hearted Cordojo Women,
who meet weekly for therapeutic tea and crumpets. These comical ladies – India
of the fruit-bearing hats, the sweet-toothed Dove, Maxine, and her homely
daughter Emily D. (a lovely shadow of the lonely poet herself), and Esther,
deaf from grief – break up the sugar when it clumps and push Anna from her
saintly shelf into the waiting widower’s arms, mirroring the love that is
already flourishing between daughter and son.
The Unfastened Heart is more than a romance, though. It is an object as
lovingly crafted as the handkerchief in which Anna shrouds a dove, with
language and descriptions right and beautiful as when Mariela recalls “the cool
press of one dove’s feet as it hesitated in her palm, its delicate forked claws
feeling like the stamp of some hieroglyphic.” At its best, the novel is a
recomendacion – “the testimonial of one person’s survival in this world,
the witnessing of one individual’s enduring hope.” If Von Herzen’s hope strikes
one as too fulsome – too hopeful, even – then maybe we’re the ones with the
problem and should consider ourselves candidates to join the Cordojo Women.
The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich (HarperPerennial, $13 paper) is the story of Lipsha Morrissey, a young Indian whose only success is failure.
When he receives a “wanted” picture of his father that his grandmother has
stolen from the post office bulletin board and put in the mail, Lipsha leaves
his no-thrills job shoveling sugar at a sugar beet plant to return to the
reservation. A prodigal son whose prodigy still alludes him, Lipsha arrives
home on the evening of a powwow and immediately falls for Shawnee Ray Toose,
the dancing Miss Little Shell. Shawnee Ray has a dream of being a fashion
designer as well as a young son by Lyman Lamartine, successful owner of the
reservation’s bingo joint. Lyman, respected and entrepreneurial to the same
degree that Lipsha is a vast disappointment (“Spirits pulled his fingers when
he was a baby, yet he doesn’t appreciate his powers…We have done so much for
him and even so, the truth is, he has done nothing yet of wide importance”),
should be Lipsha’s enemy. Yet on the reservation, nothing is that simple: “Our
relationship is complicated by some factors over which we have no control. His
real father was my stepfather. His mother is my grandmother. His half brother
is my father. I have an instant crush upon his girl.”
In Lipsha Morrissey The Bingo Palace offers the greatest gift a reader
can desire: a character you never want to leave behind. Lipsha, with his
hopeless infatuation, blind trust, stupid courage, up-and-down crazy luck, and
reticence to inherit the strengths already hidden within, is the best and worst
in all of us.
Of his home, Lipsha says: “I have this sudden knowledge that no matter what I
do with my life, no matter how far away I go, or change, or grow and gain, I
will never get away from here.” Of his girl: “I think about her in the shape of
clean beer glasses… I think about her as I stock the little rack of pocket
combs and beer nuts… I leak love. I grin like a fool when I think of her,
wipe too hard on counters and tables as though I am polishing her body…” Of
himself: “I am a mad dog biting himself for sympathy.”
The Bingo Palace is a triumphant story of hidden power: of an ancestral
pipe changing hands, spirit stones that don’t let you sink when they fill your
pockets, a baby found at the bottom of a lake, money gambled back and forth,
the mystery of those who leave and return, and the truth hiding inside true
love. It is the amazing latest installment in Louise Erdich’s series that began
with Love Medicine (now out in a “new and expanded” paperback edition
from HarperPerennial) and continued with The Beet Queen and
Tracks, but don’t despair if you haven’t read them all. I haven’t either
– yet. Philip Roth called Erdich “the most interesting new American novelist to
have appeared in years.” The Bingo Palace is an astounding, aching
portrait of growing up the hard way – as if there were any other way – a
twentysomething Catcher in the Rye meets The Graduate at a
reservation bingo palace. Bingo!
This article appears in June 16 • 1995 and June 16 • 1995 (Cover).