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April 10, 2005
By Dan Cryer
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Welcome to Daniel Alarcón, one of those increasingly
numerous Americans who straddle two worlds. Though born in Peru,
this talented young New Yorker was raised and educated in the United
States. Still, the Spanish language, extensive family ties and frequent
visits have kept him in touch with the old country. His citizenship
may be U.S., but Peru clearly rules his heart.
Featured in The New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue of 2003 and tapped
recently for a Whiting Award for emerging writers, Alarcón
bears the laurel, and the burden, of being a youthful literary hot
property.
His first book, the story collection "War by
Candlelight," showcases both aspects of his swift rise to public
attention. Strongly set scenes coexist with too-easy metaphors,
flashes of brilliance with superficial psychologizing. Overall,
though, Alarcón shows signs that he's on the verge of truly
accomplished fiction.
Six of the nine stories take place in Peru, the rest
in New York. That most of these six are far more compelling reveals
a great deal. It's exoticism - the pleasure of plunging into cultures
different from our own - that carries the book more than artfulness.
When the writer is on more familiar turf, the stories lack the same
impact and freshness.
In the longest stories, "City of Clowns"
and "War by Candlelight," Alarcón's lens takes
in wide swaths of Peruvian society. In the first, the capital city
of Lima becomes a vivid canvas of beggars, political protesters
and peasants struggling to adapt to urban life. Clowns, the kings
of street theater, stand in for the hapless shabbiness of a city
swollen with a population it cannot feed.
Oscar, whose journalistic peregrinations about the
city become the story's camera, has made it into middle-class respectability,
but his parents, like most residents, are but a step ahead of poverty.
His mother works as a maid for a wealthy family. His father, ostensibly
a builder, is better described as a thief; his real money comes
from burglaries of houses he has renovated. Oscar's enduring shame
is that his success rests on such a tawdry base.
"Candlelight" describes the arc of a brilliant
and sensitive provincial youth turned armed revolutionary. The story's
fractured chronology aptly conveys the sense of a nation at war
with itself. It's set mostly during the '70s and '80s when Peru
was convulsed by skirmishes between the Leninist guerrillas of Shining
Path and a brutal right-wing government.
Alarcón's achievement is to make his hero,
Fernando, neither a fool nor a madman but a genuinely humane man
driven to violence out of yearning for social justice. In our time,
dominated by a market mentality, this is no easy task.
Alarcón is an enticing escort into a bewildering
world where poverty is strong, democracy weak and politics inescapable.
The stories' appeal lies in a deft use of metaphor and in underscoring
the human aspects of politics, beyond ideology.
In "Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979," the author
makes us sympathize not only with the protagonist, a would-be painter
become revolutionary, but also the cop who is his adversary. In
truth, both are comrades in a city of people "worn down by
living." The dead black dogs strung up as street theater -
"Die Capitalist Dogs!" - might be any Peruvians, capitalist
or otherwise.
Similarly, in "Flood," the ruling metaphor
of natural disaster engulfs two street gangs that might do better
by battling their common enemy of poverty rather than each other.
Little wonder the prison outside town is known as the "University"
- it's where most of the men end up after their schooling ends.
By comparison, Alarcón's New York stories seem
pallid and merely workmanlike. "Absence," set not long
after 9/11, fails by being too schematic. Wari, a Peruvian painter
invited to exhibit in New York, is burdened by the absence of his
ex-wife, his talent and his native land - "Leaving is no problem....
It's the staying gone that will kill you." At the same time,
his hosts are haunted by a downtown skyline bereft of the Twin Towers.
Parallels this facile simply don't impress.
"Third Avenue Suicide" probes the barriers
to love across ethnic boundaries. An Indian woman and a Hispanic
man may adore each other, but her mother would frown on such a romance
if the young couple ever let her in on its existence. So he's forced
to disappear from their Manhattan apartment whenever the mother
is on her way from New Jersey. It's an intriguing and time-honored
dilemma, but the author hasn't made it distinctive.
When should a publisher present a budding writer to
the public? In this case, waiting a bit to let other stories gel
would have resulted in a more solid collection. But the best work
in "War by Candlelight" indicates a bright future for
Alarcón. He'll be back.Dan Cryer is the former book critic
for Newsday
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