Memoirs of a New Jersey nobody
By Sophia Lear |
October 17, 2010, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
JUST because something happened to you doesn't make it interesting. Anyone who has suffered through an overly indulgent blog post or cocktail-party anecdote is familiar with this thought, which also roughly captures the risk of first-person fiction. And that's what makes "Vida" so arresting: Patricia Engel never strays from the even-keeled perspective of Sabina, the daughter of Colombian immigrants, an unambitious young woman from New Jersey to whom nothing truly horrible or truly wonderful happens. But by the end, Engel has entirely overcome her reader's skepticism with ease.
Engel's nine short stories are narrated by an older and wiser Sabina, who recalls vignettes from her unfocused 20s in New York and Miami; her youth and adolescence in the suburbs; and a family vacation in Colombia when she was 7. Engel's sturdy, unflashy sentences aren't for savoring. Instead a tingle of recognition builds as each detail sings with the veracity of real life - like the spot-on dissection of high school politics (Sabina's first crush "was 16 and I was 14, which meant we could be friends on our block but had to ignore each other at school").
In "Green," a story about a girl who bullied Sabina from kindergarten to high school and died of anorexia in her early 20s, a paragraph begins, "That was the year of the Great Suicide Epidemic." In fact, Sabina then admits, no one died except the pill-popping mom who inspired the trend; the other attempts were just surefire ways to star in that week's round of gossip. When Sabina gives it a try, with 30 herbal sleeping pills, no one notices anything except that she "happened to sleep for a few extra hours." It's the true-to-life version of the "The Virgin Suicides," as vivid and revealing, in its way, as Jeffrey Eugenides's novel.
The relationships Sabina has that come closest to love are, notably, not consummated. It is Lucho, her first love, who sets the standard: "He came looking for me when I was invisible." Sabina's mother can't bear the invisibility that characterizes her family's life in New Jersey. "I was somebody here," she says to her husband on a visit to Bogota. But with Lucho, Sabina discovers the sweet attraction of invisibility: it suggests the possibility of being loved beyond considerations of sex, nationality, class or circumstance. The raw "I" of Sabina's narration communicates this yearning: that something can be found interesting solely because it happened to you. And although Sabina must navigate around cowards, infidelity and indifference, Engel indelibly renders her ability to defeat disappointment with hope.
Engel's nine short stories are narrated by an older and wiser Sabina, who recalls vignettes from her unfocused 20s in New York and Miami; her youth and adolescence in the suburbs; and a family vacation in Colombia when she was 7. Engel's sturdy, unflashy sentences aren't for savoring. Instead a tingle of recognition builds as each detail sings with the veracity of real life - like the spot-on dissection of high school politics (Sabina's first crush "was 16 and I was 14, which meant we could be friends on our block but had to ignore each other at school").
In "Green," a story about a girl who bullied Sabina from kindergarten to high school and died of anorexia in her early 20s, a paragraph begins, "That was the year of the Great Suicide Epidemic." In fact, Sabina then admits, no one died except the pill-popping mom who inspired the trend; the other attempts were just surefire ways to star in that week's round of gossip. When Sabina gives it a try, with 30 herbal sleeping pills, no one notices anything except that she "happened to sleep for a few extra hours." It's the true-to-life version of the "The Virgin Suicides," as vivid and revealing, in its way, as Jeffrey Eugenides's novel.
The relationships Sabina has that come closest to love are, notably, not consummated. It is Lucho, her first love, who sets the standard: "He came looking for me when I was invisible." Sabina's mother can't bear the invisibility that characterizes her family's life in New Jersey. "I was somebody here," she says to her husband on a visit to Bogota. But with Lucho, Sabina discovers the sweet attraction of invisibility: it suggests the possibility of being loved beyond considerations of sex, nationality, class or circumstance. The raw "I" of Sabina's narration communicates this yearning: that something can be found interesting solely because it happened to you. And although Sabina must navigate around cowards, infidelity and indifference, Engel indelibly renders her ability to defeat disappointment with hope.
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