Austin Downtown Arts Magazine
Record and CD Reviews
Border Dance
by Manuel Gonzales
About fat, I am both pleased and troubled, for obvious reasons:
fat is both flavor and texture, tough and tender. Taken in
moderation, it is delightful. To the nose, to the mouth. Too
much, however, becomes gristle,* rubbery and oily, upsetting
tooth and tongue, thick down the throat and heavy in the stomach.
Books are much the same.
There is good fat and there is bad.
There are good writers, and, well...
I hope for the good, as do we all, but I am certain that
in reading book after book, story after story, I shall come
across tough, rubbery writers, their words like gristle, chewy
and unsavory, their sentences and characters fatty to the
point of disgust. But then there are those indescribable (nearly,
or else I'd be out of a job) works of beauty, poignancy, wit,
and skill, responsible for both artist and artisan. Full of
words which slide down our throats, which do not trip our
tongues, which leave us light-headed and rosy-cheek-ed. Characters,
well-fleshed and well-spoken, tangible, believable, magical.
Writers willing to risk, but unwilling to risk story.
There is bad fat, and then, there is good... And so ends
my introduction to a book review column entitled "Ah,
Fat." I hope to review at any given time contemporary
works, short stories, small press publications, classical
literature, plays, and playwrights, but as always, my words
are more ambitious than my self, so have patience. I am but
one man....
Tomalo...
Frank Reed is much like any other man. Tired. At times, vain
and selfish. At times, lost. Scared. Scared of life. He doesn't
understand his daughter, has fallen out of love with his wife.
The street on which he lives, his home, even, has become dark,
uninviting, foreboding. He lacks ambition, watches as new
and young men pass by him on the corporate ladder. He drinks
too much. His love is mediocre, his thoughts are mediocre,
his life is mediocre. And then he goes to Mexico. Business
trip. He closes a few deals, eats barbacoa and tripe and frijoles,
he sweats and he drinks bad scotch, brown water, and he expurgates.
After a couple of days, he goes crazy. Takes his rental south.
Chiapas. A small village, brown water, more frijoles and tripe
and barbacoa. Jungle. Monsoon season. Bridge is out two, three
days. And there he meets a woman. A girl. A dark girl: dark
hair, dark eyes, dark skin, dark smell. He has a nervous breakdown.
She gives him a hard-boiled egg, and he drives her north.
To see her father, her brothers. Then to Mexico City. Then
to the border. The United States. Suddenly, Frank Reed wants
nothing more than to sneak this girl across the river, to
the other side, to American freedom, no matter how gray and
dreary, no matter how false. "It's not as good as it
sounds," he tells her, to which she replies, thinly,
"Life is like that." And for a moment, maybe even
just one second, he falls in love. With the girl? Perhaps.
But something more.
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Border Dance (Southern Methodist University Press, $12.95)
is T.L. Toma's first novel. His words are clean and crisp,
his style -- rhythmic, visual, enticing. Impossibly written,
measured, sharp -- a taste in your mouth, a memory floating
through your mind: your first kiss, the first time you feel
betrayed, an affair barely missed, your first romp through
the hay. Border Dance takes us on a wild, often funny, but
very real ride through one man's failed life and his last
efforts to reclaim it.
Very little about Toma's characters -- Frank, his wife, Andrea,
his daughter, Laura -- is fantastical. Magical. Except, perhaps,
their tangibility. They are not characters. They are your
next door neighbor. A friend. Someone at work, at a restaurant,
at a hotel, on vacation, at the beach. They sit next to you
at a stoplight, stand behind you at the grocery store, their
child goes to school with yours. They are not characters,
they are us, we are they. Only Socorro, the dark young woman
whose eyes linger on the border, the United States, the modern
riches within: Motel 6, Denny's, hot and cold running water,
the Alamo. Americans. Gringos. Only she is fantastic, mystical.
Shrouded in sensuality, dark and rustic aromas. And yet, Toma
brings the two together. American realism, with its fears
and doubts, its receding hairlines and missed promotions,
guilt-filled affairs and loveless romance, is coupled with
magical realism and its history and fantasy, hope and faith,
its gods and its goddesses. And not only is Frank Reed swept
up in the fantasy, the adventure, the infinite possibilities,
the dark mejicana and her desires, but so are we. Swept up
in Toma's poignant and clear imagination, swept up in the
lives of Reed, Andrea, Laura. Socorro's simple magic. Even
small characters' lives are revealed to us in a word, a phrase,
and suddenly, we know them too. See them standing in front
of us, clear and very real. Toma's wit and sharp eyes and
ears forget no one. The waitress in San Antonio, the border
police in Laredo, an old bartender in Piedras Negras, a woman
with nice legs in Boston. Nameless characters, we know them
still, name them ourselves, give them life through Toma's
words.
Toma writes with experience. His dialogue melts in your head,
and in between snatches of conversation, he leads you through
the past. His voice holds weight. The weight of wisdom and
cynicism, desperation and salvation. He has consumed the world
around him and has given it back to us, just as clear and
muddled as it was before. He is a stylist. And of him, we
can only expect further great works.
The Undeniable, Irrepressible, Dorothy Parker
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Dorothy Parker, as you may well know (and if you don't, shame
on you, and most, shame on me because I only recently found
out), was one of The New Yorker's finest, writing poetry,
short fiction, theater reviews, book reviews, and other miscellany.
Dorothy Parker was, in a word, Wit. I must admit, however,
that of her work I've read, I find her later stories and her
book reviews (ironically enough, etc.) most enjoyable. Her
poetry is filled with whimsy and wisdom and a great sense
of rhythm and rhyme, but at times bitter and too sharp for
my tongue. Her earliest short stories are well-written and
funny, but just a little stiff and formal, as if Dorothy Parker,
when first writing short stories, was not Dorothy Parker (the
writer) but Dorothy Parker the Writer of Short Stories. As
she grows more comfortable with her own voice and its place
in her stories, however, they become light and remind me of
(and no offense to either D.P. or any other Yankees present)
good Southern writing, a nostalgia and style I associate with
Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter and even Faulkner (when
he isn't writing such long sentences). When writing reviews,
though, from start to finish, she is the Dorothy Parker, undeniable
and irrepressible. Her pieces are personable, one might say
self-indulgent, irreverent and irresponsible, which makes
her writing fresh and clear and precise. Her words can be
harsh and cynical, blooming flowers of sarcasm so cleverly
written that laughter takes some of the prick out of her stinging
reviews. Some, but nowhere near all. And though most of her
reviews would make any publicist, writer, publisher, and editor
cringe, when she likes a piece, she lets you know, and she
does so with a soft, simple, powerful prose. For the beginner,
The Portable Dorothy Parker (Penguin Books, $13.95) is a fine
and wonderful introduction to her works, as it provides the
original Portable of 1944, "as selected and arranged
by Dorothy Parker herself," along with her later stories,
play reviews, articles, and the entire collection of Constant
Reader, her book reviews for The New Yorker from 1927 to 1933.
And if you have already read The Portable from cover to cover,
frontwards and backwards, then I dare say that you already
know what else Dorothy Parker can offer and where to find
it, don't you?
* I realize gristle has more to do with tendon and cartilage
and none to do with fat, but, please, leave me to the illusions
of my analogy, thank you.
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