Dagoberto Gilb’s 2008 novel, The Flowers, has been compared to S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but to my mind, all that’s little more than a trick of the light. Yes, Gilb’s protagonist, 15-year-old Sonny Bravo, is a bit adrift, and he is at the mercy of the mad world that surrounds him, but the voice belongs to Gilb alone. Set in an unnamed city closely resembling Los Angeles, The Flowers unfolds as a series of impressionistic sequences that revolve around the residents of a low-end apartment building called Los Flores. That this name represents a mangling of the Spanish for “the flowers”—the correct rendering would be “Las Flores”—is entirely the point. Sonny’s world, after all, is chaotic and elusive, a circumstance reflected by the novel’s lapidary narrative.
“There was a stink of a fire somewhere…and, yeah, also there was that nasty ammonia of wino piss new and old as everywhere as oil and grease and dried turds that, yeah, better be only dog doo, please,” Sonny tells us. “For me, it was not much like we were walking in wild nature even when we got behind one of those houses in an alley with bushy green growing all around it.”
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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Let’s linger for a moment with that passage, which feels instructive in all sorts of ways. First, there is the flow of it, the language by turns knowing (“nasty ammonia of wino piss”) and juvenile (“better be only dog doo, please”), reflecting the narrator’s man-child status. Then, there is the matter-of-factness, which makes no real distinction between the degradation of the first sentence and the hope—or better yet, the vision—of the second. It’s a vivid lesson in how to develop character through voice. It also opens up The Flowers to a necessary ambiguity, in which Sonny is subject to the difficulty of his situation, while also exhibiting an unlikely, if utterly essential, agency.
Something similar might be said of Gilb, who has followed his own path. After earning a master’s degree in religious studies, he worked for many years as a carpenter. His story collection The Magic of Blood received a PEN/Hemingway Award in 1994. Yet, like his characters, Gilb has remained in many ways an outsider, decrying the insularity of the literary establishment. In 2011, he founded the journal Huizache: The Magazine of a New America, which publishes Latinx literature.
For Gilb, Latinx literature is American literature. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that his work renders such distinctions moot. The Flowers offers a case in point: a novel named for a building whose name is mangled, in which a boy on the cusp of adulthood has experiences that are both sordid and oddly innocent. The world, in other words, confounding and also beautiful, is (how could it not be?) the middle ground all of us must navigate.•
