Book Review : Cuban Story Catches the Beat but Loses the Lyric

Latin Jazz by Virgil Suarez (William Morrow: $18.95; 290 pages)

If there’s a single literary genre we can call particularly American, it must be the immigrant saga. Constantly refreshed by new ethnic strains with distinctly different stories to tell, the acculturation novel has been ours by default for two centuries.

Though “Latin Jazz” partakes of this established tradition, Suarez has chosen an oblique approach to his material. Unlike many of its predecessors, his novel is not a linear account of the rise of a Cuban family from humble beginnings to prosperity. His characters are solidly, even substantially, middle class when they leave Santiago de Cuba.

They’re involuntary immigrants, who under ordinary circumstances would have contentedly stayed home, as the privileged have always tended to do. The Carranzas are, after all, already in the New World--secure, prosperous, and happy in a small country the author calls “the ever-glowing pearl of the Caribbean.”

Leaving a Good Life

There, Esteban Carranza is a successful pharmacist; when his daughter Lilian married Angel Falcon, there were 600 guests at the cathedral and twice that number at the reception.

When it becomes painfully obvious that the likes of the Carranzas and Falcons cannot expect to thrive in Castro’s Cuba, the extended family emigrates reluctantly to Los Angeles, where they struggle bravely to maintain a pallid imitation of the life they knew. Lilian and Angel, who in Cuba would have belonged to a leisured elite, have built a modest ice cream business, traveling from one neighborhood to another with their truck.

Esteban Carranza is a bored and lonely widower now, his beloved wife Concha having died before they left Cuba; his flourishing pharmacy is only a memory. Hugo, the son who was to have followed him into the family business, still languishes in a political prison, serving a 20-year sentence for counterrevolutionary activities. Esteban’s handsome grandson, Diego, is a drummer in a club band, all flash and no substance; his personal American dream has been reduced to the next shot, the next fix and the next available babe.

Variety of Viewpoints

Suarez has assigned each of his central characters various segments of this tale. Hugo’s ordeal is developed primarily through affectionate letters to his mother; the story of filial affection is supplemented with a dramatic account of his eventual escape from prison to join the mass exodus from Mariel Harbor.

Diego’s sleazy life is set out in the second person singular, a device that doesn’t quite succeed in involving the reader in the character’s confusion and despair. The lives of Lilian, Angel and Esteban are more conventionally observed by the author, the neutral, detached tone inadvertently distancing us from their urgent concerns.

Concha, the mother, speaks hollowly to her family from beyond the grave, reminding them of happier days in Santiago, encouraging them toward their uncertain future. “Through her the past spoke.”

These constant and capricious shifts in time, place and point of view serve only to diffuse the impact of Suarez’s story, reducing the author’s promising and original material to a scrapbook of jumbled snapshots.

Glimpses of Characters

By the time Hugo is finally on his way to Florida and the California contingent of the family is driving across the country to meet him, the reader has encountered a dozen characters without ever having had the chance to know any of them. Of the several women in the book, Concha is an actual ghost; Diego’s runaway wife is a cipher called V. And Lilian is simply industry and hard work personified, while Hugo’s sweetheart and comrade-in-arms, Lucinda, remains an abstraction of steadfast virtue.

Of the lot, only Diego’s new mistress, the lusty waitress Maruchi, has genuine vitality.

While Suarez succeeds in engaging our sympathies for the beleaguered ice cream vendors Lilian and Angel and the sorrowing but still optimistic patriarch Esteban, the overly generous amount of space devoted to Diego’s sexual and chemical escapades fails to turn him into anything beyond a caricature of machismo. Frenetic, choppy and elaborately stylized, “Latin Jazz” emphasizes beat at the expense of lyric.