Manuel Muñoz begins his third collection of short fiction, The Consequences, with a simple sentence: “Her immediate concern was money.” These five words resonate throughout the book. Set in the Central Valley, primarily during the 1980s and 1990s, the 10 efforts here are works of quiet stature, of perseverance, and of aftermath. In the opening story, “Anyone Can Do It,” a woman named Delfina is taken advantage of by a neighbor after her husband fails to return home from the orchard where he works as a picker. It is an orchard prowled by “green immigration vans.” The reference is as understated as the circumstance is dire; as Muñoz recognizes, the center of the narrative resides not in the situation itself but in what his character must do in the face of it.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
As he explained in 2022, “so many people wonder why I avoid describing important story events. I do it because the deeper story, in my eyes, is always in the after. Coping, dealing, processing, regretting—all of those are methods of retelling or reliving a story, but they’re also infused with how we tell it all again.”
I’m reminded of William Faulkner, who, in his novel As I Lay Dying—which recounts a family’s arduous journey to lay its dead matriarch to rest—chooses not to portray the burial.
Such an approach suggests that stories are what we make of them, that it is in the interior where the most important experiences reside. The idea emerges again and again in The Consequences—indeed, I’d argue, is the reason for its title—because this is a book of confidences shared and broken, often both at once.
Take the title story, which involves a relationship between two men, Mark and Teddy, that crumbles as the latter sickens. It’s not the illness that destroys their bond but the weakness of the healthy partner, who sends his lover back to his family. The writing remains matter-of-fact until the inevitable happens and Mark is left bereft.
“Mark kept looking out at the black nothing that lay just beyond the gas station,” Muñoz writes, “the black nothing that Teddy had come from, and the black nothing into which he had returned.” Aftermath again, or better yet, a sorrow without resolution, which is to say, the most human sort of loss.
I don’t want to give away too much; reading these stories offers an ongoing series of discoveries. Suffice it to say that Muñoz understands these characters at their core. To an extent, this has to do with his background; he was raised in Dinuba, a farming community near Fresno, where his family worked in the fields. At the same time, that’s just a single layer of the intimacy at work here. It’s one thing to understand someone’s physical experience; it’s another, deeper thing to recognize them at the level of their soul. In this remarkable book, Muñoz addresses the need for a particularly elusive sort of sustenance, a way to survive.•
Join us on February 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Muñoz will sit down with CBC host John Freeman to discuss The Consequences. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
