A Literary Gen-Xer in Latin America

Alberto Fuguet, a brash rising star of Latin American literature, spent his childhood in Encino. And he’s proud of it.

Challenging the leftist, anti-U.S. tradition of many Latin American writers, the Chilean leads a group of young authors who call themselves the McOndo generation: They embrace McDonald’s, Macintosh computers, MTV Latino and other U.S.-produced cultural staples. They respectfully reject “magic realism,” a school of fiction identified with Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other giants of the literary “boom generation” of the 1960s.

McOndo, which is also the name of a 1996 collection of short stories by 18 authors under 35, is a satirical variation on “Macondo,” Garcia Marquez’s mythical hamlet where people levitate and talk to ghosts. Fuguet, who co-edited the anthology, mocks the stereotype of Latin American writers wearing Che Guevara berets and wielding heroic pens against U.S. imperialism. He and his cronies explore a more personal, apolitical and concrete landscape.

“Our McOndo is as Latin American and magic as the real Macondo, which, for that matter, is not real but virtual,” Fuguet said. “Our McOndo is bigger, more overpopulated and full of pollution, with freeways, subways, cable TV . . . five-star hotels built with laundered money, and gigantic malls.”

The rise of this generation of authors, who have inspired scornful reviews as well as praise, is important because of their restless intellectual energy and defiance of expectations. They speak for the Latin America of 2000, a place of headlong modernization and entrenched backwardness whose reality is indeed magical: It juxtaposes satellite dishes and shantytowns, Internet entrepreneurs and barefoot peasants, gangsta rappers and insurgent colonels.

And Fuguet’s unlikely odyssey from the San Fernando Valley to the Chile of dictator Augusto Pinochet and on to fame and fortune has given him a unique vision of the bilingual, bicultural future: Latin America and the United States are closer than ever. McOndo extends to Spain, as well as to Southern California and the rest of the United States where Spanish is widely spoken.

“You can’t think about Latin America without the United States; Spanish is part of the United States,” Fuguet said. “And Latin America is First World and Third World.”

At 35, Fuguet has published four books, written and produced a movie, won prestigious U.S. fellowships and racked up accolades from the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa, the distinguished Peruvian author, and Time magazine, which named the Chilean a Latin American leader for the new millennium.

But Fuguet’s self-appointed role as hipster rebel has provoked literary fisticuffs. Writing in the Santiago daily El Mercurio, the Rev. Ignacio Valente deplored the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in a 1990 collection of stories called “Overdose,” Fuguet’s first book, as “a return to certain forms of sophisticated barbarism that do not enhance our literature or the cultural future of the new generation.”

Leftists Dismiss New Generation as Poseurs

Firing from the left, other critics dismiss Fuguet and company as simplistic, self-indulgent poseurs whose success has resulted, in the words of Chilean critic Ricardo Cuadros, from their “selective amnesia . . . ‘banalization’ of literature and history, and public celebration of ignorance.”

Judging by his commercial success, however, Fuguet has struck a chord with readers.

“In Santiago, there are times when he seems less a writer than a rock star: Adolescents show up at readings to touch him, as if he were a cultural icon,” said Bolivian author Edmundo Paz-Soldan, a professor of Latin American literature at Cornell University in New York who contributed a story to “McOndo.”

Paz-Soldan is something of a prodigy himself. At 32, he has published three novels and three books of stories. He thinks the furor over Fuguet’s “patricidal” manifesto against magic realism is exaggerated and said the McOndo group has matured and calmed down a bit since “McOndo” came out. Fuguet sometimes gets a bad rap because of his image rather than the substance of his work, Paz-Soldan added.

“He has always had that strength that for some makes him a great leader and for others makes him the symbol of everything that is wrong with the new generation,” Paz-Soldan said. “He says things that shock people. He’ll come out and say ‘[Argentine writer Jorge Luis] Borges bores me; I had more fun watching “Starship Troopers.” ’ Alberto had a different upbringing than many of us, a different childhood.”

Different indeed. Tormented relationships between fathers and sons recur in Fuguet’s work. His own story starts with his father’s decision to migrate from Chile to Los Angeles in the late 1950s. The move was motivated not by economic or political considerations--Chile was a peaceful democracy at the time--but by wanderlust and, Fuguet suspects, because “he wanted to get away from his father.”

Fuguet’s father worked blue-collar jobs at the Los Angeles International Airport and Wonder Bread and was joined by his two brothers, who became citizens and served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Fuguet was born in 1964 during a visit to Santiago by his mother, but he grew up in an Encino household that was resolutely English-speaking and Anglo-oriented.

Looking Back on a Suburban Upbringing

During a recent interview here, Fuguet described his childhood over salad and espressos at a sidewalk cafe next to the British Embassy in Providencia, a trendy Santiago neighborhood. In person he is slender and intent behind his glasses but mellower and wittier than his maverick reputation might suggest.

“All of my friends’ parents worked at Universal Studios, not necessarily big executive jobs but they worked there,” he said. “The neighborhood was mostly Jewish. Ours was the only house that had sparkling lights at Christmas. I went to Hanukkah celebrations. I had nothing to do with the Latino world. I never went to Los Angeles.”

Attending the Rhoda Street Elementary School in the land of “The Brady Bunch,” Fuguet became enamored of reading, television and movies. He recalled the school fondly, saying that he was in a program for gifted children and that teachers rewarded creativity and individuality.

Fuguet’s mother, however, worried about the dark side of U.S. urban life in the 1970s: drugs, crime, racial tension. She missed Chile. She came from a middle-class family that disliked Chilean President Salvador Allende, the Socialist who came to power in 1970. Two years after Pinochet overthrew Allende in a 1973 coup, she persuaded her husband to move back.

For Fuguet, who spoke no Spanish, it was like moving to the moon. Chile was an isolated, fascistic, fanatically Roman Catholic police state. He was very much an outsider--a wonderful formative experience for his future writing career but not for the psyche of a boy entering his teens. He had been raised in the land of color TV; his new world was oppressively black and white.

“I think only now am I realizing what it was like,” he said. “I blocked it out for a long time. I got here, and my goal was to learn Spanish, without an accent and in a hurry. And let’s say that being a gringo was not very cool.”

Making matters worse, Fuguet’s father couldn’t readapt to his native country and returned to Southern California, where he still lives as an “Orange County Republican,” in the words of his son. The family, like so many others in Chile during those grim times, fractured.

Fuguet learned Spanish, the primary language in which he is published, but still finds it easier to read and write in English. He gobbled up all the U.S. movies, music and books--thrillers, Harold Robbins novels, science fiction, “a lot of trash”--he could get his hands on.

Although his family was pro-Pinochet, Fuguet was not. He describes himself as “less a victim than a product of Pinochet. Those of us of a certain age are his products. We all have a little Pinochet inside us.”

University life in the 1980s was dominated by an increasingly vocal leftist student movement opposed to the dictatorship. Fuguet, a journalism student, took part in rallies but said his “heart bled inside” when his peers burned American flags, scorned U.S. music and pressured him into an act he still regrets: At a protest against the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, he threw a U.S. Army jacket given to him by his uncle into a bonfire.

Enough was enough. “I decided I could be anti-Pinochet while not abandoning my U.S. side. It was ridiculous. This has made me enemies, because there is still the mentality that the true Latin American intellectual detests the United States. I am connected with everything that has to do with the U.S., for better or worse.”

An Encounter With a Literary Grandee

This epiphany converged with the growth of his writing talent. In 1984, Fuguet was accepted into a writing workshop at the University of Chile led by the late novelist Jose Donoso, the nation’s venerable representative of the literary “boom generation.”

It was not a happy apprenticeship. McOndo and Macondo collided head-on. For an assignment about childhood, Fuguet submitted a short story based on an experience in 5th grade during which he was stranded at the Northridge Mall. The story did not impress Donoso, who disliked the student’s Yankee irreverence and his preference for Bukowski over Dostoevsky. Donoso ended up kicking Fuguet out of the workshop.

“He told me it’s impossible for a writer to come out of Los Angeles,” Fuguet recalled. “He asked me if I was taking this as a joke. It was made clear to me that my internal world was not good enough. Donoso said my childhood was very happy: cars, a pool, bikes. As if for a real childhood I had to have been raised in the South, the son of a miner.”

Fuguet defiantly kept writing. He worked as a crime reporter and film and music critic, won fiction contests and started publishing. His influences range from Vargas Llosa and Manuel Puig--the Argentine author of “The Kiss of the Spider Woman,” whose obsession with film and pop culture made him “the most North American of Latin American writers”--to Richard Price and J. D. Salinger.

In fact, Fuguet’s breakthrough novel, “Bad Vibes,” published in 1991, has been compared to “The Catcher in the Rye.” It follows the wanderings of an alienated upper-middle-class youth through a repressed but dissipated Santiago of fast sex and heavy drinking in the 1980s.

Fuguet eventually reconciled with Donoso, who became a mentor and landed him a spot in the prestigious writing workshop for foreign writers at the University of Iowa.

It was in Iowa City that Fuguet became disenchanted with what he says is the politically correct tendency of U.S. and European readers to equate all Latin American fiction with magic realism--a genre associated today with such authors as Isabel Allende that combines supernatural events with everyday occurrences in a matter-of-fact tone without differentiating between the two.

At one point in Iowa, Fuguet had a story rejected by a university publication because it was “not Latin American enough, whatever that means. They said it could have happened in the United States.”

Similarly, Fuguet has mixed feelings about being asked to comment on the current political upheaval over Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in London, where the ex-dictator has spent 16 months fighting extradition to Spain on charges of human rights abuse.

Fuguet knows that Latin American authors are expected to speak out on politics, that tradition almost mandates political commitment, but he prefers telling stories to spouting opinions. Nonetheless, he feels that Pinochet is all but dead, even if the psychological repressiveness of his legacy still weighs on Chileans.

“In the public eye, he died,” he said. “It’s like what happens in a family when a grandfather is sick and it’s hard to force yourself to go see him.”

Fuguet stays busy. His fourth work, “Red Ink,” a 1996 novel about tabloid crime reporters, is being filmed in Peru. “Somewhere in the Night,” his film about two brothers on a road trip, will debut in Chile next month and be shown at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, Calif., later this month. He is working with Paz-Soldan, the Bolivian writer, on an anthology of stories written in Spanish by Latin American and U.S. Latino authors about the United States. Tentative title: “Se Habla Espanol.”

And he retains a journalist’s hunger for street material: He wants to keep reporting, keep traveling, keep exploring the glories of McOndo. Latin America has so much to offer a writer, he said, from lavish condominiums bought with smuggling profits in the steamy Ecuadorean port city of Guayaquil to the transcultural funkiness of Tijuana and Miami.

“These are places where you don’t have culture like in Paris; you don’t go to Tijuana for the opera or Paraguay for the books. But you find things that one day will be books. That’s a little bit what McOndo is all about.”