Literary Review

By Michael Sedano

Hey, do you read much?

If you don't read a whole lot, you're going to enjoy "Polaroid of a Young Man as an Artichoke" because you didn't know you could say things like this and get away with it. You'll get a kick out of this reading.

If you are one who reads, you've come to recognize the difference when a writer just sits down and starts typing, and a writer who takes a reader seriously, setting out as a writer to make statement as interesting as the story. Thousands and thousands of tomes a year, writers do, for pages or chapters at a time, writing great paragraphs that you check mark or dog ear the page. Put enough of those together and you are a best seller.

Tomas Gonzales' "Polaroid of the Young Boy as an Artichoke," published at aztlannet.com. The story is interesting reading, and fun. Not because of the story--that's yet to come from this writer--but owing to the writer's puro hyperbole and anarchistic point of view. Curiously, "Polaroid" is also religious, as much a cautionary tale about sin and its consequences as a piece of experimental writing.

The boy has broken a rule. He is late for church. He has been late before and has gotten punished before. Today he is humiliated and driven from the church by a frenzied parish. Pausing for a breath of fresh air a bird shits on the boy who walks off out of sight. Maybe he should be on time from now on. Maybe, too, he should have shut his mouth when he spied the pilferer. Maybe the guano from heaven is a message, but what?

I'm sure the writer didn't intend me to ask that. But it's there. This is art and one sees in art what one is prepared to see.

Gonzales' real story is the writing, the language, itself. Gonzales seems to have chosen every word with exquisite care emphasizing visual detail to read like a word movie. When the third person narrator talks, the perspective is that of an establishing shot, a bird and a bell tower. A building. A crowd. A ground level view of the kids lining up to march in to mass. In the distance, the boy enters the scene.

It's a pleasure to study how Gonzales, focusing on small details like paper trash, the smell of wax, shoes, beads, praying hands, frames the story so a reader can see these lensed close up, as witnessed through the boy's eyes.

A superb instance of Gonzales' visuality comes early as the writer crafts a dual perspective with the boy both inside the church and outside of the church, but with the ambiguity that, "from within," could be a metaphor of a spiritual identity:

"As his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room, the boy slowly walked to the middle set of doors. Rising up on his toes, he peered through a window. The light of the celebration falling full on his face, for an instant, a portrait of the young boy could be seen from within."

The writer's hommage to an Irish precursor sets up unwished for comparisons between this chicano, Tomas Gonzales, writing in occupied Aztlan today, and James Joyce or Samuel Beckett writing in Europe during the early part of the last century. I prefer to allow Gonzales' art to stand on its own ten fingers, as in the lovely light of this reverie on the crucified Christ:

"For the first few seconds a new candle burns freely as the flame stretches to its furthest height. In the next seconds the flame settles into the wax that forms at the center, where it remains, silently feeding. Inevitably, the time comes when there is no longer sufficient fuel, and the flame begins to grow dim, and the candle, forced to conserve energy, begins to flicker. After a time, the flame appears to die, and in the next instant it jumps to life again, seeming to burn at its most brilliant, and then flicks off and then pulls the air in on itself and causes the bubble bursting sound that now caught the boys attention. When the flame is finally done, a fine line of smoke momentarily spirals and stretches, and then is gone. In his minds eye the boy now followed the fine smoke twisting and turning up into the cold, empty rafters."

What happens next challenges any but a satiric reading, which would seem to be Gonzales' real strategy in his morality play. Pummeled and cudgeled by a raging mob, the boy holds his ground until the worst of the uproar slackens. Then he faces the congregation then strides away from the candles, the bootpoints, the fingers, the lips, the "impermeable nose" (I didn't get that one). Outside the church. Where he gets shit on.

Clearly, the writer suggests, events have consequences. The boy must by now be asking himself, "what is this shit?" hence the cautionary tale and the start of a great satire.

I'd like to see the writer take the piece long now. As it stands, a literary experiment, the piece offers a splendid moment in language that raises an interesting question about writing literature. Graciela Limon, asked why her women lived such difficult lives, related mas o menos, "my characters tell me what to write, I just write it down." I wonder as to the provenance of Gonzales' story, did the writer's observation lead him to craft the story or did the story force its way through his keyboard and onto Aztlannet? If "Polaroid of a Young Boy as an Artichoke" were expanded into a fully fleshed work of fiction, that would be interesting que no?

At any rate, a longer work would force Gonzales to give us more to enjoy, and that of itself is worth the wait because "Polaroid of a Young Boy as an Artichoke" is what is now. Visit the story at Aztlannet.com

mvs