Dagoberto Gilb’s “The Flowers”

By Jenny Shank, 2-22-08

The Flowers
by Dagoberto Gilb
Grove Press
250 pages, $24

With his new novel The Flowers, Austin-based Dagoberto Gilb has written his most powerful book to date, digging his hands into the fraught subject of race relations, but doing so in his signature humorous, meandering, natural way that makes him such a winning chronicler of Western urban life.  Although Gilb’s story alights on all kinds of touchy topics—racism, illegal immigration, women’s roles, sex, and drugs—he never lectures.  Instead, he creates a complex tableau of humanity that allows readers a fascinating glimpse into the sort of lives they may have wondered about.  Gilb’s narrator, a 15-year-old Mexican-American named Sonny Bravo, speaks in a distinctive patois that mixes in the lax English grammar of teenagers ("anyways"), Spanish ("Qué guapo es my little man!"), and even some French, which Sonny is studying as a lark.  The result is an inventive language that sounds like that of today’s YouTubed American youth.

As The Flowers begins, with Sonny describing his habitual thievery and his unmarried mother’s romantic troubles that spill over into his life, it’s hard to tell where the story heading, but it’s so entertaining, peopled with such colorful characters, that you don’t care if it’s going to go anywhere or not.  I had settled into enjoy the book as I did Gilb’s first novel, 1994’s The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, expecting great set pieces and description, but no real pyrotechnics out of the plot, but the plot of The Flowers becomes increasingly gripping and does provide fireworks before the end.

After a string of bad boyfriends, one of whom attacked Sonny, Sonny’s beautiful mom, Sylvia, decides to marry a white guy named Cloyd Longpre (whom Sonny comes to refer to as “The Cloyd"), a man who takes pride in displaying the mounted heads of animals he’s shot. Sonny suffers from half-neglect ("…my mom, if she wasn’t at her job, was out on dates and whatever"), and has grown accustomed to making his own dinner and keeping his own company. 

But with his mom’s marriage to The Cloyd, Sonny is uprooted to Los Flores, the apartment building that Longpre manages.  (As Sonny figures out, it should properly be called “Las Flores,” and this funny detail reminded me of a character in a novel the protagonist of Mickey Acuña reads, who is misnamed Consuela instead of Consuelo.) Sonny’s mom begins to cook a little, something she’s never done before, and Sonny is expected to perform chores around the building, such as sweeping, painting, and taking out trash.  He does the tasks biddably, with the sort of ironic “yes sir” show of respect to Longpre that teenagers so delight in.

Just as Mickey Acuña focused on the daily life of the inhabitants of a YMCA, much of the action in The Flowers centers around the mundane activities of the residents of Los Flores.  Except that they turn out to not be so mundane.  From Pink, a jive-talking used car salesman who is rumored to be an albino African-American, to the nerdish Mexican-American twins that Sonny befriends at school, to Nica, an innocent Mexican immigrant girl whose parents don’t allow to attend school or leave the apartment, each of Gilb’s characters are vivid and fresh.
Gilb’s narrators remind me of a more macho version of Baudelaire’s flâneur, a “gentleman stroller of city streets,” taking his time, observing the people around him.  But in The Flowers, simmering tensions in the community and myriad temptations (such as a scantily clad young wife named Cindy who is bored at home and seeks Sonny’s attentions, and money that Sonny discovers in Longpre’s office) draw Sonny out of his observer stance and cause him to take decisive action.

Gilb’s off-kilter humor is a key delight of The Flowers, demonstrating a perspective that is youthful enough to be believably that of a 15-year-old boy, but also a wisdom beyond Sonny’s years.  In once scene, Sonny explains why he starts buying his meals at a nearby bowling alley rather than eat at home.  “I hated deer meat and will always hate deer meat.  Cloyd food.  Another time was fish.  I pretended to get sick on that, which in a way wasn’t hard because this fish had an eye staring up at me from the plate.  Like the deer, he killed it, it was his--he was proud of that kind of shit.”

Gilb’s descriptions of urban life are visceral and evocative.  Toward the end of the book, there’s one very long, virtuosic paragraph that records Sonny’s impressions of the passing traffic in a panoramic way.  It’s hard to convey its rhythm with a short excerpt, but here’s a snippet:

“People were driving home with groceries, wanting hot dogs or ice cream or bananas or peanut butter or cookies or cereal.  People were driving with beer and Quaaludes and whites and black beauties, wanting to have sex or watch it or talk about it, and people were snapping at kids in the backseat who were playing and happy, rolling the windows up and down and they were getting yelled at about food they ate or would eat or a toy they could have or lost, and people were driving with their husbands and wives and they weren’t talking to each other, and old people were driving scared, afraid of every turn and stop like they’d never been there before or maybe they’d seen so many things they didn’t know what to expect next.”

As much as I’ve enjoyed Gilb’s prior books, The Flowers tops them all, and represents a big leap forward in Gilb’s artistic growth.