Before autofiction, there was autobiographical fiction, and before autobiographical fiction there was nothing very much. There’s no whole cloth in fiction; the novelistic floor is littered with our private scraps and remnants. Invented stories are also inventories of the self: dressed facts; felt, remembered tales. When Cervantes came to write the second part—the sequel—of “Don Quixote,” he incorporated into his novel a real rival writer, Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, who had already published a knockoff “Quixote” sequel of his own. Tolstoy borrowed so much from his own life, and so directly, that he once remarked that he lacked any imagination. Kafka edited his harrowing allegory “A Hunger Artist” on his deathbed, while suffering from starvation brought on by tuberculosis.
Francisco Goldman’s new novel, “Monkey Boy” (Grove Press), looks like a nicely impertinent example of autofiction. A middle-aged writer named Francisco (Frankie) Goldberg, like Goldman the offspring of a Jewish-American father and a Guatemalan mother, takes a train from New York to Boston to visit his ailing mother, who is in a nursing home outside the city. Like Goldman, Francisco Goldberg, who narrates this book, was raised in a small suburban community outside Boston; like Goldman, our narrator is a novelist who has spent much of his adult life in Mexico and Guatemala working as a journalist, and is the author of a recent book of reportage about the infamous assassination of a leading Guatemalan bishop and human-rights advocate. (Goldman’s book, from 2007, is called “The Art of Political Murder”; Goldberg’s more flippant title, “Death Comes for the Bishop,” is perhaps the one Goldman wanted but knew he couldn’t have.) There are countless such correspondences between Goldberg’s fictional existence and Goldman’s real one, and these, in turn, enable autofiction’s apparently randomized freedom: essayistic riffs; a return to the dark material of “The Art of Political Murder”; considerations of the U.S. involvement in Central American political violence; a memory of first reading, in the summer before college, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” on Boston Common; and so on. As with Valeria Luiselli’s recent novel “Lost Children Archive,” the contents of a whole life and mind are being assayed; the formal analogue for this project, as with Luiselli’s, might well be a box or an archive of many different texts, beginning with the author’s own diary or notebook.
But “Monkey Boy” is also a memory book, a novel that reads like an autobiographical immersion, a story that travels relentlessly between a difficult present and an unfinished past. In this guise, Goldman’s book recalls older, if not necessarily less experimental, works of fiction. The great novelistic autobiographers Proust and Bellow, both mentioned in this novel, sponsor Goldman’s story. In “Monkey Boy,” a middle-aged male writer and witness, like Moses Herzog, or like Charlie Citrine, of “Humboldt’s Gift,” is dealing with some tricky contemporary business (here, as in Bellow, often amorous). The contemporary business is lightly, even haphazardly, plotted, because the real pressure, the storied onrush, comes from the past—from inescapable memory. Indeed, the protagonist may struggle to reconcile the demands of the present with the more urgent cry of memory.
In this case, bringing together the child and the seasoned adult may involve a kind of spiritual revolution, a casting off of the past by a reliving of it, a turn in the middle years toward a different way of being. Francisco Goldberg, unmarried and childless, has recently met a younger woman, a Mexican immigrant named Lulú López. They encountered each other at a “learning sanctuary for immigrant kids in Bushwick,” where Frankie runs “a Wednesday evening story-writing workshop.” (This is the novel’s version of Stephen Haff’s Bushwick schoolroom project, Still Waters in a Storm, which also makes an appearance in “Lost Children Archive.”) Lulú appears one evening to collect one of the kids, who is a cousin. Frankie falls in love, perhaps truly for the first time in his life. But that life is strewn with the shards of unsuccessful relationships, and he has a long history of solitary travel and work. If the question he has about Lulú is how much she really loves him—an anxiety that runs through the book—the question he must have for himself is how well he can really love Lulú: he must change his life. “Proust wrote in his novel that a man, during the second half of his life, might become the reverse of who he was in the first,” our narrator tells us. “When I first read that a few years ago I liked the line so much I wrote it down on a piece of paper and put it into my wallet.” This novel is that wallet.
As Frankie gets closer to Boston, his memories quicken into life, rich and painful at once. The most acute concern is his late father, Bert Goldberg, who was a wall of rage and malcontent. Anti-Semitic quotas kept Bert from Harvard, and the Depression kept him from studying medicine at Johns Hopkins, since his family needed his salary. And so “Grandpa Moe made him stay home and go to work as a locksmith so that he could help support the family.” He then studied chemical engineering at Boston University, “eventually leading to his long career in false teeth”—Frankie’s mordant way of summarizing Bert’s job as a chemist at the Potashnik Tooth Company. The narrator likens his abusive childhood to a war story. He returns again and again to his angry father, and the violence he meted out on his sickly and academically disappointing son. In one talismanic scene, Frankie fights back, and knocks his father to the ground; the memory seems, in equal measure, to thrill and to horrify our narrator. The parents’ marriage was largely loveless. Francisco “never once in my life saw my parents kiss, never saw one lightly caress the other in a loving or even passingly sensuous way.” While Bert physically attacked Frankie, “with my mother and sister, it was insults, bullying, berating, derision.” Meanwhile, at school, Frankie—“monkey boy” to his bullies—had to dodge racist classmates like Gary Sacco, scion of the Sacco family, who built the subdivision the Goldbergs lived in, and who had a road named for them. To be beaten up by Gary Sacco and his gang on Sacco Road must have felt like being definitively put in one’s place.
Yet Frankie’s account is full of rebellious comedy and vitality. Goldman is a natural storyteller—funny, intimate, sarcastic, all-noticing. At Penn Station, Frankie, about to board the train to Boston, takes what he calls his “Louis Kahn memorial pee” in the men’s room where the great architect died of a heart attack: “I always picture his final collapse onto the floor like Nude Descending a Staircase, a paroxysmal grandeur but with a short, elderly Jewish man clutching his chest and falling.” The prose is loose-jointed, hybrid, elastic. Goldman describes the gentrifying area of Brooklyn where he meets Lulú thus: “Corner tiendas where neighbors like to gather to chat and gossip are being replaced with coffee bars where bearded blanquitos in eyeglasses sit on stools behind laptop computers at long front windows staring out at the street. . . . Staring out from behind their eyeglasses at the street that one day will be all theirs.” And, more lyrically, there is this lovely portrait of a snowstorm on Clinton Street, where Frankie and Lulú go walking: “Clinton Street in the snow looked like a long, straight logging road through a frozen forest, snow-piled branches, blanketed parked cars and trash cans, the occasional taxi rumbling past like a Red Army tank.”
Tellingly, in a book so shadowed by a violent father, the sources of vitality, laughter, and resistance tend to be female. Francisco admires Lulú’s academic ambition. He recalls an old girlfriend from his days in Mexico City, a photographer named Gisela, who was a talented shoplifter: “To this day the best kitchen knife I own is a Wüsthof that she stole for my birthday from the Palacio de Hierro on Avenida Durango . . . whenever I move, I take it with me.” His earliest memories involve his grandparents’ house in Guatemala City, where he went to live with his mother when his parents split up for a few years—a house of dark rooms, heavy furniture, caged finches and canaries.
An extended recollection from this period of Frankie’s life demonstrates the hospitable rhythms of the prose:
The density of the memory, the playing over present and past, the essayistic space made for an ongoing political dimension, along with an insistent optimism—all these are characteristic of the novel as a whole, and of Goldman’s feel for a kind of narrative phrasing that allows an ideally sauntering and shifting perspective.
At the heart of the novel’s own tenacity and optimism is Frankie’s mother, his mamita, Yolanda Montejo. Yolanda, an immigrant who never became an American citizen, harnessed to Bert’s misery and “trapped in a gringo suburb with this alien family . . . in a two-road, mainly working-class neighborhood overlooked by a cemetery, amid rocky field and cold forest,” would seem to have ample cause for complaint. A mark of how successfully she repressed her own misery is that Frankie tells us he became aware of his mother’s unhappiness the year that he left for college. Instead, he recalls her gaiety and crooked, defiant spirit. Mother and son were told by his school to speak only English at home. But, on weekends, Mamita would take Frankie to a Boston church to watch movies starring the Mexican comedian Cantinflas: “We spoke Spanish on those Sunday afternoons in Boston and I loved how that made me feel so close to Mamita, like we were alone in a foreign city.”
When Frankie’s first novel is short-listed for a prize (Goldman’s first novel, published in 1992, “The Long Night of White Chickens,” was short-listed for the pen/Faulkner Award), Yolanda is both proud and disappointed, because she doesn’t like the book’s portrait of the mother. Like all wayward literary sons before him, Frankie tells her, of course, that she isn’t anything like the mother in his novel—quite the opposite, in fact. “I made her the opposite of you so that you couldn’t say I’d written about you,” he says.
Unappeased, Mamita photocopies, enlarges, and frames the disclaimer from the novel’s copyright page, which asserts that “any resemblances to any actual person is entirely coincidental,” and hangs it next to the front door. Such tenacity doubtless propelled Yolanda out of the “gringo suburb” to her parents’ house in Guatemala when Frankie was a baby, and to a fifteen-year career as a teacher of Spanish at the Berklee College of Music. Old now, with failing memory, she is still full of temperament, her hair dyed “a soft maroon with a slight orange tinge, a sort of cranberry-orange English marmalade color.”
“Monkey Boy” steadily becomes a moving and tender elegy for a woman who seems to have spent most of her life suspended warily between visceral love of her birthplace and learned gratitude for her adopted home. Mother and son make each other laugh. At the nursing home, Frankie teases her that she was a “distinguished professor of marimba” at Berklee. They play Scrabble, she permitted to use English and Spanish, he restricted to Spanish. The implication is that Bert’s recent death enables such pleasures. Frankie’s newfound intimacy with his mother represents, of course, a blow against the grim memory of Bert, but also, perhaps, a way of beginning that moral revolution, proposed by Proust, which had so struck our narrator. He admits that he has been, until recently, a poor, distant son and brother. To the careless eye, he might seem, in middle age, the very image of productive self-sufficiency, the writer who needs no one, who has purified his life for the purity of his work. But there is something else, too, in this new proximity to Yolanda. Francisco has managed to live much of his adult life outside America, consumed by his journalistic work on the American-backed violence that wrecked Guatemala and other Central American countries in the nineteen-eighties. Although Yolanda spent most of her life in America, and her son has spent most of his life outside it, they somehow share a certain way of not belonging in this country. As Francisco puts it, he has instinctively followed his mother’s path, “willfully divesting” in order to join her in self-division. To return to his mother, to the Boston of his childhood, and to do mental battle with the memory of his father finally seem a way of ending one phase of his life and starting another. In this regard, the novel ends optimistically: Lulú is texting from Brooklyn; the young relationship may hold.
“Monkey Boy” creates a circle with “The Long Night of White Chickens.” The two novels share a great deal of autobiographical material—a half-Jewish American, half-Guatemalan narrator (named Roger Graetz in the first book), the same childhood outside Boston, complete with the same local bullies and racists. Both books move insistently between the comparative peace (albeit with neighborhood menaces) of a remembered American childhood and the murderous turbulence in Guatemala. But “Monkey Boy,” impatient with conventional novelistic structuring, bolder in some respects than Goldman’s first novel, is desperate to seek a reckoning that, if it does not exactly lie beyond fiction, may sit uneasily within it.
That reckoning would seem to be deeply personal, for it involves Goldman in assessing himself and his parents as honestly as possible. In “The Long Night of White Chickens,” the narrator’s father is portrayed as genial and sweet-natured, a truly good man. With terminal ferocity, “Monkey Boy” sets that record straight, bringing both parents out of fictional camouflage and into something that feels like the transparency of memoir. One suspects that Goldman’s mother would still not care for the project, but that this time neither mother nor author could credibly claim that “any resemblances to any actual person is entirely coincidental.” We will never know, alas. “Monkey Boy” is dedicated to the memory of Francisco Goldman’s mother. ♦
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