A Novel on a Mission : HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESUS, <i> By Ronald L. Ruiz (Arte Publico Press: $19.95; 314 pp.)</i>

Ronald L. Ruiz’s first novel, “Happy Birthday Jesus,” falls into a genre that has produced some of the most compelling fiction of the past two centuries: the novel that humanizes a criminal and lets us walk in his shoes. Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song,” Nelson Algren’s “The Man With the Golden Arm,” Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” and (unquestionably the all-time champion of the genre) Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” all make a case that “there but for the grace of God” go we, the readers, back to our safe, law-abiding lives--after we put the book down--but with our own humanity forever enlarged by the vision of what we too might have become had life been a little less benevolent to us.

The success of any book in this genre depends upon one big factor: whether the protagonist, the criminal, becomes a credible human being, or whether he remains a puppet of the author’s propaganda; and propaganda, no matter how well-meaning, does not a great novel make.

From the very beginning, Ruiz’s Jesus Olivas is a tough character to swallow. Never mind his biblical name (Christ faced his own judgment on the Mount of Olives), this virtually illiterate “monster,” as he is called on the book jacket, who has brutally raped the only woman who ever loved him, a prostitute named Chole, and maimed the village priest, the closest thing to a father he ever had, appeals to us with a poetic sensibility that might well suit a university-degreed poet. He routinely whips off observations such as “Fog covered that great valley; soft, thick clouds of whiteness gleaming in the sun, giving no sign of the dreariness below”; or: “the weak winter afternoon faded.”

There are lots more things to dislike about this novel. The Illinois printer who had originally contracted to typeset the book refused to finish the job, saying he found “the sexual graphic language” unusually offensive. Indeed “Happy Birthday Jesus” contains some of the most distressing and gruesomely ugly sex scenes this side of your nearest S&M; porn rack. As Chole tells Jesus, offering him a hard-earned chocolate cake for his 18th birthday, just before he smashes it in her face and tries to choke her: “There are so few things to enjoy.” And that line is really the key to this novel, the thing that makes it a gripping work of fiction despite a wealth of flaws.

The heart of Ruiz’s story is what it means to grow up permanently on the outside of all human community, even family. Jesus has no family. His father a pimp who hit the road even before his mother died in childbirth, he is raised by a grandmother, ‘Ama, a totally self-centered and loveless woman, a self-made martyr whose sole passion is to get herself declared a saint by the Catholic Church. Like many another religious zealot, ‘Ama will crush any obstacle that gets in her path, including her grandson. Seeing his boyish needs, especially his incorrigible masturbation, as roadblocks to her own canonization, ‘Ama relentlessly tortures him not only into submission but also into a virtually autistic existence, where he fears to speak to anyone lest he incur further punishment.

‘Ama’s bizarre rituals anticipate the sort of sexual abuse and degradation Jesus will encounter in the California state penal system. The novel resonates with such parallels, and its most fundamental motif is the racism that pervades every aspect of Jesus’ life. Born a Mexican-American, he is forced to fight both whites and blacks from the first moment he enters a schoolyard; and even his fellow Latinos later exercise their own form of discrimination against him, telling him that his raggedy fruit-picking clothing and “dopey” behavior make him “a disgrace to the Mexican race.”

At times Jesus seems to become a mere polemical instrument for the author, a former prosecutor for the Alameda County district attorney’s office and now a defense attorney for several Mexican-Americans on Death Row, especially when he is harping on the inequities and racial bias of our criminal justice system; but the scenes in the book depicting Jesus’ experience of racism--and his acceptance of it as a preordained way of life--ring absolutely true and take on an engaging life of their own. When Jesus as a child feels “dirty and dark”going into one of the downtown white-owned stores, where the salesladies ask him what he wants as soon as he walks in the door, we blush with embarrassment for him.

In those scenes when Jesus is most beaten down, when he has given up completely on family, school, church and even God as having anything good or gentle to offer him, “Happy Birthday Jesus” comes most alive as a work of fiction. It then thrusts us vividly into the consciousness of those members of our society who may become the ruin of all of us, simply because we have never dared to look them in the eye and communicate with them as equals.

In Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” a novel to which “Happy Birthday Jesus” has already been compared, the black man Bigger Thomas is sentenced to death for the murder of both a white woman and a black woman, but his real crime--in the eyes of the white court--has been mingling socially and sexually with people outside his own race. Bigger Thomas, illiterate and antisocial as Jesus Olivas, had the gumption to reach out for a better life. As Wright described him, “he felt the need for a whole life and acted out of that need.” But Jesus Olivas’ claim to originality as a character is that he has given up on the possibility of reaching beyond the stunted grasp he was presented with at birth. He has given hopelessness a new name. And even when he finally strikes back at the end, burning his boyhood church and murdering a priest, it is a gesture of supreme futility. The real priest he wanted to kill has long since gone, and for this pointless violence he will sacrifice the freedom and chance for a new life that a do-gooding attorney has won for him.

The grim message of “Happy Birthday Jesus” is that one can survive, but only to endure more of the same; and its unasked question is how that vicious circle can ever be interrupted. It is a question that most urgently needs asking, and Ruiz’s novel has earned an important place in our literature for the courage to shock us from our complacency, just as the horrors Jesus experiences finally force him to act--if only to his own self-destruction.