The Elegant Variation: GUEST REVIEW: EVERY NIGHT IS LADIES' NIGHT

TEV DEFINED

The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

January 18, 2005

GUEST REVIEW: EVERY NIGHT IS LADIES' NIGHT

Every Night is Ladies’ Night
By Michael Jaime-Becerra
HarperCollins/Rayo
288 pp.
$23.95

REVIEWED BY DANIEL A. OLIVAS

One of the truths revealed by Los Angeles fiction is that it includes, by necessity, tales from those small cities that adhere to the ragged edges of Los Angeles proper. In Michael Jaime-Becerra’s subtle and beautiful debut collection, Every Night is Ladies’ Night, we are introduced to one such city: El Monte. Jaime-Becerra spins ten interlocking stories around the hub of El Monte, a working-class community of just over 100,000 people, the vast majority of whom are Latino.

The stories bounce back-and-forth from 1984 to 1989 with one leaping thirty years further into the past. The protagonists reappear all tied to streets like Valley and Live Oak, businesses such as Road Runner Liquor, Pick-A-Part, Tortillerilla Bienvenida and the ubiquitous McDonald’s. People scrape together livelihoods as mechanics, fast food managers, tattoo artists, truck drivers and musicians. We see how children, teens, parents and grandparents try desperately to fit in, keep their dreams alive, fall in love. Most of the characters we meet are members of the Cruz family.

In “Buena Suerta Airlines,” Hector and Minerva Cruz are new parents. But Minerva returns to her job at McDonald’s, at her mechanic husband’s urging, to help keep the family afloat. We get a taste of Minerva’s painful juggling act in the first few, evocative sentences of the story:

“Over the last two years I’ve dressed in the dark so Hector will have a chance at those extra hours of sleep. I stick the last pin in my hair, put on my cap, and check on Peter one more time before leaving the bedroom. I kiss his forehead just like I do every morning, and try to smooth his spiky black hair. I’m thankful that, over these last two years, I’ve also learned how to touch my son without waking him.”

“Georgie and Wanda” takes place in 1956. Georgie, whom we’ve seen in other stories as the older, white owner of a body shop, is now a young stock car racer who dreams of dating Etiwanda Andrade, Queen of the Black and White Ball. In a scene that reminds us of how much things have changed, Georgie eventually takes her out but to a restaurant where Etiwanda is the only non-white customer. But in Georgie’s colorblind innocence, he notices this fact only when Etiwanda uncomfortably points it out.

In the sublime “Media Vuelta,” José Luís, an aging mariachi musician, travels by Greyhound bus from Chihuahua to El Monte in search of his first wife, Rubí. Jaime-Becerra paints a deep and affecting picture of this man’s simple search for his first love as the story switches repeatedly from the present to the long-ago beginnings of the mariachi’s career and first encounter with the beautiful, young Rubí. The end of his odyssey is bittersweet but grounded in unforgiving reality.

Jaime-Becerra knows that not all life experiences lead to grand epiphanies or dramatic personal growth. With great skill, he shows us that we often battle just to stay in place. This is a beautiful, accomplished debut.

(This review first appeared in Southwest BookViews. You can read an excerpt from this collection here.)

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January 18, 2005