When I think about the Central Valley, I think about the plane forever crashing into a gas station in Caruthers, just south of Fresno and west of Highway 99. It’s a shocking, kitschy roadside attraction that juxtaposes the projected human-made danger of an exploding gas station against the surroundings of small highways and fields.
The lives presented in Manuel Muñoz’s short story collection The Consequences approach a similar, urgent collision. Muñoz’s stories act as high-definition snapshots from a San Joaquin Valley filled with challenges and choices that bear results, consequences, that no character in the collection can avoid without breaking a cycle.
Highway 99 pulls the driver away from the familiar path of Interstate 5, or the slower, more scenic Highway 101 or coastal Highway 1, going instead deeper into California’s Central Valley, with fewer and longer opportunities to double back and drive across the Valley’s width, back to the familiar two-lane culinary tourist traps that adorn the 5: Taste of India in Buttonwillow; Kettleman City’s fast-food paradise, In-N-Out Burger included; Pea Soup Andersen’s Santa Nella location; the palm tree–lined Harris Ranch Resort restaurant and hotel in Coalinga.
A few years ago, I wrote about the fields my grandfather worked across California as a migrant farmworker. Research for the essay led me to take road trips toward Fresno and its suburbs, farther away from those I-5 landmarks I grew up passing on long drives visiting my sister in Berkeley from our childhood home, Pomona, at Los Angeles County’s eastern border.
Driving 99 and its surrounding highways, I found odd landmarks that the characters in The Consequences might find familiar: a water tower shaped like a Swedish coffee pot in Kingsburg; Superior Dairy’s popular ice cream in Hanford; construction for a nascent high-speed-rail system; and that plane crashing into a gas station in Caruthers, a trainer World War II fighter plane purchased for its parts.
The characters in The Consequences, however, lack the privileges I had on those trips: a car, citizenship, a day or two off from work.
Muñoz centers the world of his stories predominantly in 1980s Fresno and its neighboring farm towns. Beneath every story is a ticking shot clock urgently pushing each decision and narrative forward, a tunnel of choose your own misfortunes. Every action creates an inescapable ledger of repercussions and the communal judgments that follow: Fingers without wedding rings are noticed as points of vulnerability. A parent’s glimpse into the spaciousness of the rooms in a new home assuages the difficulty for him that a mixed queer couple live there, one of whom is his son.
A new mapping is created across the collection. Muñoz’s characters navigate a California known to those who live and work in its shadows—to the undocumented well aware of those immigration raids at the end of harvest, after the work’s done, the wages still unpaid.
In “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA,” Griselda is a seasoned veteran of navigating downtown Los Angeles streets, Pershing Square, the bus station, in the hope of reuniting with her husband, who is repeatedly removed from the country by la migra, along with other workers whom farmers are determined not to pay, but returns. Griselda’s armor cracks when faced with a newbie to the scene, Natalia, overdressed and underprepared, and she begrudgingly shares her room with Natalia for the evening, before each woman begins searching for her man anew the next morning. Neither woman can sleep; their emotional labor continues into the night. Griselda drifts into a waking slumber recalling the memory of a stern teacher who instilled in her a backbone, and we understand that her pity is truly directed not so much at Natalia but at the person Griselda had been before.
The stories also map those desires that morph into road trips across the Grapevine into Los Angeles’s clubs to find bodies that match frequencies desired but not found in the Central Valley. In the titular story, a romance leads to a decision that haunts the protagonist to such a degree that he takes an interstate road trip, which leads to a final act of forgiveness. Upon arrival at his destination, the weight of his exit from his car is akin to Neil Armstrong’s finding footing on the moon, the vulnerability palpable within this small movement.
The Consequences begins with a woman making decisions about money for the sake of her family and ends in the story “What Kind of Fool Am I?” with a sister making the important decision to not come home to Fresno, done with bailing out a sibling caught in a cycle of sex work and potential self-harm, making SOS calls to be picked up, and leading the sister to places like the Greyhound station in Los Angeles.
This final choice, missing the bus home to Fresno to start a life of her own in Los Angeles, is also the final consequence of The Consequences, one that charts a new path not for tourists to gawk at plane-crash roadside attractions but to locate those hidden crossroads from which Californians’ stories need to be told.•
Please join us on Tuesday, January 28, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when author Viet Thanh Nguyen will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guests Don McKellar and Rumaan Alam to discuss The Sympathizer. Register for the Zoom conversation here. And be sure to register for the conversation among Manuel Muñoz, Freeman, and a special guest about The Consequences here.
EXCERPT
Read a passage from “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA,” a story from Muñoz’s collection. —Alta
CEREBRAL PASSIONS
Read critic Anna E. Clark’s probing examination of The Sympathizer as a thriller of ideas. —Alta
UNCANNY ISLAND
Jessica Blough reviews Sara Sligar’s second novel, Vantage Point, which holds a “vision of a reality that propels us faster than our rationality can understand.” —Alta
“CONFRONTING WILDFIRES”
In CBC author Viet Thanh Nguyen’s recent children’s book, Simone, illustrated by Minnie Phan, the titular character is a climate refugee. The book looks at her evacuation experiences due to wildfire and how she deals with them through art. —KPBS
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