Remember “books”? Those flippy rectangular things you used to spend a lot of time reading, back before the internet? Often associated with “school.” I largely lived through them, once, but now I read far fewer than I used to, particularly in the genre of the contemporary novel. Apparently the same is true with nearly everybody, though; we reading folk have migrated over to the internet, or so I’ve read (on the internet), where we take quizzes about which 19th-century Russian novelist we are, while 21st-century novelists languish in obscurity, looking for day jobs and fretting about their $40,000 MFA-program debt.

They’ve reason to fret, too. In today’s literary market, a first novel — or, even worse, a collection of short stories — has about as much chance of selling for publication, or, once published, garnering media attention beyond a few diehard blogs and usual-suspect print publications, as the storied man in the moon (who probably has a Facebook page). I’ve read it everywhere from the hardcore-lit blogs to the New York Times Review of Books: With a few vapid, easily digestible exceptions (Eat, Pray, Love, anyone?), books are in the dark, feverishly groping for their readers.

Yet, the counter-argument goes, all the reading world still hankers for verbal narrative as much as it ever did, for the human-scale, speed-of-thought, take-it-to-bed-with-you pleasures of good fiction. This is the reason the Harry Potter books and the accursed Twilight series sold so phenomenally well (and, hell, I shouldn’t h8; at least people are reading something, right?), and why the September suicide of David Foster Wallace (no more footnotes?) haunts the bookish culture sector with such acute sorrow — also largely, with DFW-appreciable irony, via the internet.

For my money, fiction’s still the most economical, most open-ended, and most deliciously personalizable of the arts, and while reading it still requires sustained focus (which may be its central problem), good fiction richly rewards a reader’s interior life, and engages any imagination capable of furnishing and painting the human circumstances described by a skilled writer — regardless of genre, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or region. Fiction enlarges our understanding in ways no other art can. As for the tag “regional fiction”… isn’t all fiction regional? I know more about Southwestern Ontario (that it exists, for example) from reading Alice Munro’s quietly harrowing short stories than I ever would have otherwise, and my absurd mental snapshot of Trinidad is largely framed by V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas.

But Trinidad and Ontario are foreign places. I know Matamoros, the city that Bárbara Renaud González describes in this passage from her new (and first) novel, Golondrina, why did you leave me?, but have never thought of it in quite this way before:

No grand plazas here, or grand hotel balconies overlooking a regal fountain where children are splashing and chasing pigeons in the city’s center. Nothing grand here at all. Amada is surprised at the sandy earth and Jorge says it’s because of the proximity to el golfo, not like San Luis cradled by its mountains. Dios mío, Amada thinks in desperation, this country isn’t real, it’s made of old breadcrumbs, thickened with water into a cornpaste, molded into churches, patios, people, even barking dogs…this is a city inspired by some drunken ceramicist with dried-out paint and some chipped pottery. And what a name, a city named for a moor-killing saint, bad luck, Amada wants to weep.

“¿Que quiere decir Bronz-vil?”

In case you don’t speak Spanish, the line of dialogue there is “What does Bronz-vil (i.e. Brownsville, phonetically rendered) mean?” Or more literally: “What does Brownsville want to say?” Here is a mark of good fiction: I laughed as I read that question, both at Amada’s musing on the luck or un-luck of a city’s name, and at my sudden realization that the question “What does Brownsville mean?” is a surprisingly existential one. Not one tackled by a lot of literary fiction, to be sure.

Bárbara Renaud González has definite ideas, within the universe of Golondrina, what Brownsville quiere decir, as well as what Muleshoe wants to say, and what San Antonio wants to say. And throughout this novel, it helps to have some Spanish in order to fully grasp the saying of it. The two languages, as in the passage above, reflect and refract each other in surprising and deep ways, and the combination of the two, as all tejanos know, affords a special music.

Golondrina, why did you leave me? is the epic saga of Amada (i.e. “beloved”, which seems an appropriate nod to Toni Morrison — indeed, of the skeleton of literary influences within this novel, Morrison’s the spine), a flawed and intelligent mexicana who abandons her family and emigrates to Texas, where her (second) Tejano husband, Lázaro (i.e. “risen dead guy from the Bible”) and their kids (one of whom, a daughter, is the narrator) wander through the mythic Texas landscape and ruminate on the Lone Star State’s complex and often-violent history. Lázaro and Amada search for work and love, try like hell to keep the family together while suppressing secret loves and shames, and give each other no end of trouble y lagrimas. The title is taken from corridos and love poetry, which often lament the golondrina, a type of small sparrow, flying away across la frontera.

But here’s the problem: Any linear description of Golondrina’s plot, themes, or preoccupations immediately starts to take on dreaded Oprah-esque appurtenances. I can feel you out there, readers, especially y’all of the Wallace-mourning ilk, thinking “oh, yawn, a female-of-color post-colonial immigration narrative.” Which Golondrina, of course, is. Further, it’s the first novel released in the new Chicana Matters series at the University of Texas Press, and on its Acknowledgments page shouts-out Sandra Cisneros, whose seminal House on Mango Street turns 25 this year, and whose influence is palpable in the work. For a certain reader (often a monolingual one), this gets his back up.

And Golondrina bears some of the flaws of the post-colonial genre of fiction. The imagery is sometimes sentimental, it makes sweeping leaps of philosophic logic, and it’s so historically ambitious that this reader, more than once, got confused and looked stuff up on Wikipedia. Its editors should’ve encouraged González, who spent 10 years writing Golondrina, to cut it by about 60 pages. We get genealogies of relatively minor characters dating back to the depredations of the Spanish Empire in the 17th century (bearing a strong resemblance both to Marquez’s epic genealogical digressions, and to Faulkner’s coda that not only is the past not gone, it’s not even past), and already-hackneyed descriptions of male lovers as conquistadores. Etc.

But what makes Golondrina special, what drives its considerable innovation and perfumes its hundreds of tiny pleasures, is the sheer descriptive mestizaje beauty of the novel’s language, word-by-word, in English and en español. González wields Golondrina’s Tex-Mex dialect with real mastery; in her hands, the language is lyrical, big, luxurious, funny, and terrifying. González’s arsenal, linguistically and as a storyteller, is immense and complex, with Joycean neologisms (“cornpaste”) and fierce rhythm. I have no doubt that Spanglish patois could irritate or daunt some readers, who might cringe at each italicized word (a publishing protocol I personally don’t like, visually — what, they think readers would scan over a Spanish word in regular, un-italicized type and our brains would explode: “AAAGH! ‘Huevo?’ WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?”).

Golondrina, for all its potential difficulties, deserves and has the power to attract a wide audience. If you care about the changing face and language of American contemporary fiction (of world fiction; East Indian authors in particular, primarily in the UK, are pioneering new forms of English phraseology, too), and if you love a good story, and appreciate vivid descriptions of Texas landscape, architecture, culture and history rendered with surprising touches of beauty and dark humor, I’ve got a book for you bien cierto. •

Creadoras

I got a chance to talk to Bárbara Renaud González last week about her writing process and the state of contemporary fiction. Among the topics was the 25th anniversary of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, a seminal, now-classic work of American fiction and part of high school and college curricula in the U.S. and abroad. Esperanza Cordero has joined Scout Finch and Holden Caulfield in the canon of American fictional heroes.

“Sandra [Cisneros] really gave Chicanas permission, in a sense, to tell our stories, and helped us believe the world would listen,” González said. “But there are lots of other stories, other writers out there. There’s tremendous diversity within the Chicana experience. Tejas, por ejemplo, is completely different from Chicago or California. I can’t not see Tejas as epic. And there are masterpieces about Texas sitting in desk drawers, and I could name names,” she laughed.

González did name names of writers to check out, if you haven’t already:

Denise Chávez

A New Mexico native and Trinity grad, Chávez won an American Book Award in 1995 for her novel Face of an Angel, and her 2002 novel Loving Pedro Infante was hailed by Publishers Weekly as “full of abuelita wisdom and raunchy cantina wit.” Chávez is also a playwright, was a writing professor at the University of New Mexico, and founded the Border Book festival in Las Cruces.

Helena María Viramontes

Now an English professor at Cornell University (where she mentored Junot Diaz), Viramontes grew up in East Los Angeles during the Chicano Blowouts era, and was one of only five Chicanas in her graduating class at Immaculate Heart College. She went on to post-graduate study with Gabriel García Márquez, and is the author of the novels Under the Feet of Jesus (1996) and Their Dogs Came With Them (2007), a kaleidoscopic, stream-of-consciousness fictional account of LA from 1960-1970.

Other authors recommended by González: Dagoberto Gilb (Woodcuts of Women), poet Ben Saenz (Carry Me Like Water), Luis Rodriguez (Music of the Mill). Check out Bárbara’s blog at barbararenaud.blogspot.com for more literary musings.