May 18 - 24, 2005
By Tim Appelo
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This skyrocketing young writer has been pegged as a Peruvian-American phenomenon, but even though Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, he's really American Peruvian, raised in suburban Alabama by his immigrant parents. After Columbia University, he lived in Lima on a Fulbright, then poured his impressions into the nine stories of this perceptive collection, his first book. At 28, he's already won a Whiting Award and been featured in The New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue.

The stories depict the milieus of New York and both rural and urban Peru. The New York ones don't work for me. In "Absence," a Peruvian artist (who gets a breakthrough show in Manhattan) feels deracinated. In "Third Avenue Suicide," the Peruvian boyfriend of a mysteriously sickly Indian girl feels resentful because she makes him leave the apartment whenever her mom, who demands an Indian son-in-law, visits. The stories shed zero light on Manhattan or the characters.

But Alarcón's fiction switches on the floodlights when it focuses on Peru. The title story, about a revolutionary torn between his hunger for justice and his yearning to dandle a baby on his knee in his quiet tomato garden, conveys with impressive economy what it's like to live in a place where bombs cause random blackouts, where right-wing tyrants and leftist ideologues tear the nation to bits—and the hero's heart, too. In Alarcón's world, the streets and jungles feature similar menace: Put your lunch down in a jungle rebel hideout and a creature will erupt from the soil to devour it; get caught in a Lima traffic jam and street kids (called "piranhas") will swarm your car, smash your windows, and run off with your stuff.

"Hurt by too many German philosophers in translation," Peruvian youths hunt stray dogs to string up from street lamps with signs reading, "Die Capitalist Dogs." Everything is forever terrifyingly yet excitingly up for grabs: your luggage when you step off the bus in Lima (if the bus manages not to plunge off a cliff in the Andes); your farmland when a landslide buries your entire town.

In Alarcón's best story, "City of Clowns," a boy's father uses his roguish charm and "mistizo Clark Gable" looks to start a second family, abandoning the boy's mom. The dad does residential construction work, then recruits the son to help him burgle those same homes six months later, using the cash to send the kid to college. As a grown-up, the boy joins Lima's army of beggars in clown suits, spying on his mother in red-nosed disguise. Alarcón subtly peels back the layers of betrayal and shame.

His prose is sinewy, his rhythms terse, his eye sharp—and his plotting rudimentary and his themes simplistic. I can see why Columbia's English department was mean to him, forcing him to flee to anthropology. He tends to see people as social types. At his best, however, in his Peruvian vignettes, he's free of the self-consciousness and trendy, mannered ironies of so many young American writers. Most important, he's got stories you haven't heard before.