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A Heavy Dose
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20613 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1992 |
706 Words |
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Andrew Vachss
Andrew Vachss, a lawyer who represents children and youth
exclusively, frequently writes on the subjects of crime and
violence. His latest novel is Shella (Knopf). |
THE BOY WITHOUT A FLAG
Tales of the South Bronx
Abraham Rodriguez, Jr.
Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkwood Editions, 1992.
115 pp., $11.00
The conventional wisdom about short stories is this: Everybody loves to read them…and nobody buys them. There is this perception that short stories should be, somehow, "free," and, with hardcover prices approaching budget-breaking levels, a collection is a high-risk venture. In a country more concerned with quality in consumer products than with quality in social-political leadership, this is not surprising.
The Boy without a Flag is going to change some minds on this subject. So thematically linked that it could be legitimately marketed as a "novella," this attractively priced collection of short stories offers a heavy dose of value on both fronts.
The collection is closer to ground-zero participant-observer journalism than to "stories." The young author, Abraham Rodriguez, has an evocative, poetic voice--"The Black-hole windows of the empty building stare at me like they wanna swallow me."--a voice occasionally capable of imagery so precise that it transcends time-place limitations, communicating in that rarest of languages--universality: "My blood reversed direction in my veins."
Whether describing the pain of a young boy confronted with the hollowness of his father's situational "nationalism," (the title story), a teenager's desperate desire to understand betrayal and rejection ("Birthday Boy"), or a subway motorman who is driven by the iron beast he allegedly pilots, the recurrent theme is "family" and the child-to-adult transition, hypercompressed by pressure from all sides: the streets, the narrow range of (perceived) options, hormones.
In the South Bronx, the strongest light shining down is Darwin's law. It's a struggle, and some go down. Some go down fighting. Listen to a young girl--a junkie, living on Sugar Pops and heroin. Her girlfriend Sara just had a baby and has already begun the pervasive neglect that will scar the infant's future. When the baby cries, Sara's response is:
"Put this over his face an he'll shut up," she said, handing me a blanket. "It always
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