Something I read said Monkey Boy was “nearly autofiction.” I don’t know anything about Goldman’s history, but to me it seemed like completely autofiction. Set with the present being sometime in the 2000s, it goes back and forth between the novel’s present three days and events in the character’s life as well as imagined events in his parents’ and other ancestors’ lives. (Maybe that’s the part that’s not autofiction.)
Francisco Goldberg is a writer who has recently moved back to Boston from Mexico because of threats to his life resulting from the reporting he’s been doing about Guatemala. Over the course of three days, while he visits various figures from his past, he goes over his relationship with his abusive Jewish father, his relationship with his failing Guatemalan mother, the difficulties his split heritage brought to his life, and his relationship with his much younger girlfriend. He also recalls events in war-torn Guatemala and other subjects. Anyway, in his discussions with old friends and babysitters, he learns things about his family’s past that have been kept secret.
It took me a while to get into this novel, which I read for my Pulitzer Prize project. I am not sure why, because the writing is good and the events should have involved me. Maybe it was Goldman’s habit of getting to a point of interest and then spinning off to tell everything he knows about that person instead of what you’re interested in. (I have more recently encountered that tendency in Victor Hugo, only to the extent of hundreds of pages.) And sometimes that apparently climactic point turns out to be anticlimactic after all. And he does like long paragraphs.
I didn’t particularly like Francisco. Aside from doing some pretty rotten things when he was a kid, he seems to be focused almost exclusively on himself. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that he could be physically abused by his father for years without realizing that his mother was not just verbally abused but also physically abused. And then there’s his refusal to visit his sister for years. (He claims it’s not because his parents left her everything.)
What? Me Read? 