The word consequence does not appear in the King James Bible. Oh, there are punishments reaped and fates that are sowed—but consequences, that very behavioral term, are not to be found. Perhaps a consequence, coming to us from the late Middle English, from Old French, as in “to follow closely,” is not a word for the New World. A world tipped toward the present and away from the past, even if all the effects born from the past are evident to be seen.
We are currently living in the consequence of a world of no consequence, a world in which no matter how much misinformation has been thrown at the clear links between burning carbon and climate crisis, conditions continue to heat up, burn, and create new pandemics. The extremely rich mostly get to skip these consequences, or dodge their terrible cost—their homes are rebuilt. The rest of us, the vast majority of humans on the planet, live in the wedge of light and darkness their actions create.
Manuel Muñoz has written a masterpiece about people navigating these lights and shadows. The Consequences is a slim book, containing just 10 short stories, but it is large with feeling, scope, and desperately close in its intimacies. Parts of it are so hushed, so moonlit with longing, that they feel spoken into a confession booth. Other sections open up and reveal, in a few quick brushstrokes, the whole rotten structure of an agricultural system built on precarious laborers: working all week, to be rounded up by la migra the day before they are paid.
That neither of these frameworks competes with the other has to do with the steadiness of Muñoz’s gaze, the patience and humility of his ear. The Consequences does not charge toward injustice, hurrying out in front of its characters to herd a reader toward a reaction. Instead, the stories build in close focus, in the language of a neighborhood, a place, a friend group. A bakery frequented by retired men. Not for nothing was one of Muñoz’s two previous collections, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, modeled on Sherwood Anderson’s great linked portrait Winesburg, Ohio. Here is Anderson’s modern successor, moving softly through the world.
This universe of the Central Valley is close to Muñoz. He grew up there, in Dinuba, California, the child of farmworkers who harvested grapes, among other crops. He spent some summers and winters in the fields from about second grade up until sixth grade. In this, he joins Sherley Anne Williams, the poet and author of the historical slave novel Dessa Rose, as one of the great geniuses to emerge from these fields with a feeling for their silences, the pulse of the heat, the betrayals that happen so easily. This landscape appears to have made his imagination.
As a writer, Muñoz has an extremely rare ability to situate people within the landscape. The Consequences swivels between the abstract geography of the Valley, in which the most potent presences are living elements—the fields, the orchards, the fog hovering over the earth, spilling into town, the huge blue sky—and specific corridors of work, transit, escape. Quite a few people in this book are moving, have recently arrived, or are planning to leave where they are—heading north, south, back to Texas, or in some cases, back to Mexico—even those with papers.
In one of the collection’s most autobiographical pieces, “Fieldwork,” a narrator visits with his ailing father, recently laid up in the hospital with a stroke. In between visits from nurses, the man and his mother jog his father’s memory with conversation. “You picked crops, right, Dad?” he asks. When his father answers hesitantly, the narrator switches to Spanish, “Naranjas, right, Dad?” which provokes a flood of memories.
When he heard the Spanish, he nodded and continued recalling in his own language. Cotton and tomatoes, too. And almonds, my father added, and figs and nectarines, there was so much work. Apricots, plums, corn, pistachios, the lemon groves over on the eastern slope of the Valley into the Sierras. Walnuts and cauliflower. Cherries and pears. He kept remembering things. Strawberries hiding in the dirt. Pecans. Persimmons. Avocado trees in the prettiest green rows you’ve ever seen. Olives and wheat. Hay bundled up for the horses and the cows. Apples, because the Americans liked their pies.
This is one of the most gorgeous paragraphs about the land written in the 21st century. Look at the way the bounty tumbles forth in its jeweled specificity. There is awe, gratitude, and sweat here. Light with his touch, Muñoz allows the old man’s voice and sensitivity to come through—“because the Americans liked their pies,” “the prettiest green rows.” What is most loving here, but not belabored, is that his son has recorded this life’s labor, has made it as valuable as what it picked, and has held it forth as of great value.
A new meaning to consequence arises here. A consequence needn’t only be the unwanted result of a recent action; what if a fruit is a consequence of labor, of care? What if a child is a consequence of love? And what if listening is a consequence of that love growing up? Accordioning between the generations, Muñoz’s collection reestablishes connections, small and large, and in so doing reveals the world to be much more knit together than it is often given credit for being.
This is not to say that the stories in The Consequences merely preserve this deep network of meaning. Rather, they construct drama out of showing us how it lives and operates. And how connections can be threatened. In “Anyone Can Do It,” Delfina, a woman new to the Valley and who awaits her husband’s return home—he has either been deported or picked up in a raid, or maybe run off—puts her trust in a stranger. Lis, the woman who lives next door to Delfina, is also alone, and she wants to work. All she needs is to borrow a car.
What follows from the moment Muñoz’s heroine decides to trust Lis is a heartbreaking slide toward betrayal. As the story escalates to its perfect ending, the reader keeps waiting for a reprieve, which comes in the form of the grace shown by its heroine—broke, given a $20 by a foreman who recognizes the bind she’s in, she buys three cokes, a loaf of bread, and a package of bologna. She gives the foreman one of the colas, as a show of thanks.
Forgiveness and grace and shame weave among these stories in powerful, unpredictable ways. A closeted father of a teenage boy who is on his way to becoming a player presses upon his son a gesture of tenderness that shows his son that kindness might be the ultimate style. In another story, a man edging out of youth catches a lucky break from the plague years when he tests negative. When his ex-lover goes back home to his small Texas town to die, he follows just in time to lurk outside the funeral.
Muñoz’s ability to slide, just like that, from one point of view to a God’s-eye glimpse of a place in a single story has powerful social effects. It allows his stories to construct dramatic juxtapositions in a short amount of time—precarity living right next to power. Whiteness and its entitlement. In “Susto,” the body of an older man is found, his head buried in the earth. The foreman involved in overseeing the fields where the body turns up begins haunting a local bakery, frequented by men like him—white, older. A waitress, young and poor enough to be allowed by her parents to work on a Sunday, takes pity on him and tells him the man was not unknown, as the police determined, but a neighbor to many Mexican people in town, Don Facundo. He simply worked with cattle farmers.
“Susto” is the darkest story in the book, a piece of gothic fiction that feeds on the shadows, on violence, and on the sense of guilt that has stalked its narrator. Most of the rest of the stories in the book surface more easily into life, even when the realities of their characters press down heavily upon them. In “The Reason Is Because,” a teenage mother leaves her baby with her mother so she can walk to town and go to the fair. “Later on,” Muñoz writes, “when she returned to the apartment, she would endure her mother. But right now, the walk in the fading afternoon light reminded Nela that it was Friday and she could see the weekend anticipation on the faces passing by as cars drove over to the carnival.”
Nela’s escape has consequences, but they are not presented here as punishments, or anything that she has sown for herself. They are simply part of the reality of living. In “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA,” a woman boards a bus to Los Angeles to try to find her partner, recently picked up in a migrant raid, who will likely have been released and who will have crossed back over the border. As the bus heads south, more and more women get on, until eventually one sits down next to her. She is young, overdressed, and clearly doesn’t know what awaits her in L.A. Just like that, the older woman has to decide whether to help her.
Helping, caring, loving, they all have consequences. Doing so can put a whole life—a new lifestyle—at risk. In “Presumido,” a man named Juan and his partner have a good life, better than Juan could have ever expected growing up. They own a home with enough bedrooms that Juan’s father, when he comes to visit, moves from room to room in a state of bewilderment. At one of the parties they attend, Juan locks eyes across the room with the woman catering the food, cleaning the kitchen. “Her look of hard dissatisfaction dissolved when she had locked eyes with him and Juan had seized up at the way she had looked back, as if she might have been somebody he recognized, or who recognized him.”
In that moment, Juan faces a decision, to cross the room and acknowledge her, to close the distance between them, or to separate. Muñoz’s great power is to show him trying to do both at once. Here is one of the unintended consequences of getting what the narrator wanted: to be cast onto the other side of a scrim by virtue of his unease and, maybe, his guilt. That we experience this spiral in a story, which also shows us the great comfort Juan takes in his lover, the mechanics of the fights he has with him, the brusque way the man tries to control his drinking, makes the story’s ending all the more devastating.
Everyone in this book wants and needs more, but even when they get it, it’s not enough—in part because it’s so expensive to be poor. Whether it’s the young woman on the bus, using all her money to meet her partner in L.A., or Juan, a long way from “the poverty scalped yellow grass and dirt driveways” of his childhood homes, the risk of humiliation is also ever present. As Juan thinks about why he didn’t want to host a party at their home: “He had not wanted to be under scrutiny…the one on guard, the one who had to put on a good face for the rest of the group.”
In this world, where a young boy can be called “as thin as his empty wallet,” the edge is right there at all times. Muñoz’s greatest talent might be his ability to show just how sharp that edge is, how persistent, but how it is not total. It is not the only thing of consequence in the lives of his characters. There is the long arm of the law, of punishment, of course, but there is also love, mourning, friendship, aspiration, and comfort. There are sausages cooked well, a bathrobe, and a child listening closely. There is living. Would that we lived in a world where using such a capacious optic when dealing with the poor, the documented and not, seemed less radical.•
Join us on February 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Muñoz will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Talia Lakshmi Kolluri to discuss The Consequences. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
