A teenager is a galaxy unto themselves. Their childhood is so close they sometimes feel nearer to animals. But they’re also far enough from adulthood as to be ignored. In this way, they sometimes stand among us, watching and observing, unheeded, taking it all in: the strange bargains of adult life. The social mores people think they need to talk about to enact. The secrets.
This knowingness can cut both ways, though, for watchful young teens, and if you want to rub a hand against these differently serrated edges, the blade in motion at the dawn of the Chicano arts movement, simply pick up Dagoberto Gilb’s The Flowers. Unfolding in the meandering, skeptical voice of 15-year-old Sonny Bravo, the book is a bravura portrait of a young man standing at the sharp lip of knowledge.
Sonny has just moved to the Los Flores apartment complex with his mother, Silvia, and her new husband, a hard-drinking Okie named Cloyd Longpre. The Cloyd—as Sonny’s friends call him—doesn’t much like Black people, but he thinks Mexicans are hardworking, so he puts his stepson to work doing odd jobs around the complex.
This work, tedious though it is, liberates Sonny from their tiny apartment. For the first half of The Flowers, he haunts the complex like a ghost—painting, weeding, and mostly watching the comings and goings of its various residents. He lurks around the apartment of Nica, a teenager, like him, whose parents have swing shift jobs and leave her at home all night alone, watching her infant brother.
Selfish as all teenagers can be, Sonny is not unaware. He notes how trapped Nica is by unchosen responsibility, and he understands that Cindy—an 18-year-old, recently married to a wayward man—is shipwrecked by loneliness. The combination of tenderness and sweetness and confusion and lechery with which Sonny navigates his interactions with them is deeply realistic.
But there’s much more—from elderly residents to middle-aged construction workers and a neighbor named Pink, who sells cars to his own stepfather, there is a small Winesburg, Ohio–like ensemble who populate Los Flores. Unlike Sherwood Anderson’s cast, most of Gilb’s lives on the fault lines of official and unofficial roles. Cindy is a wife in name only; Pink is a businessman who works from the curb; Sonny’s mother needs more from her teenager than she can give him.
The action in The Flowers mostly takes place in the apartment building, but it begins to expand in outward orbits as Sonny adjusts enough to his job to slack off. Some of these places remind us that Sonny is still a boy—a bowling alley, where he has cheeseburgers—while others, like the front seat of a Bel Air that Pink wants to give him (in a complicated bargain), speak of a world outside. When his mother catches sight of him sitting in the car, she warns him away from that man—why exactly, she won’t say.
At some point, all these intermingled relationships depend on one another for support—and for silence—making for an explosive situation. In The Flowers, this arrives in the book’s second half in the shape of a city uprising (the city goes unnamed but resembles Los Angeles), an event that feels deeply unsurprising given the tensions that have simmered in even the smallest interactions Sonny has witnessed or simply felt. “It was happening everywhere,” Sonny thinks when one resident’s wife comes home, angry to learn that her husband is already drunk. “Everything was about taking sides.”
Sonny is both right and wrong. He has grown up on the move, and so his watchfulness and distrustfulness exist for good reason. Gilb has done a beautiful job of making a young man out of self-protection. But observation isn’t necessarily living. At some point, it becomes clear that our narrator, whose voice is the river we are traveling, is mostly silent. The less he says the better.
And there are other forces—social winds he senses at work and can’t name but feels too. They are the pace of a car, driving by too slowly on the street; Sonny’s sense, when a Black man looks at him, to look down; the way his ear knows one of his stepfather’s friends is racist, before he finishes a sentence; and his bafflement when Pink takes him on a drive to a new neighborhood and he finds the man embraced—by people unlike him—as a friend.
All of this is done with such economy and subtlety it feels like a more tragic, urban Midsummer Night’s Dream. This dreamy clarity is a familiar feeling in one of Gilb’s books. For four decades, he has been one of our most nimble writers. Powered by images and the sound of speech, his prose moves in protean, unexpected ways, like a conversation based on partial knowledge—which is every conversation Sonny overhears.
Over the course of this brief book, Sonny has taught himself to listen for the slippages. Waiting for them may have made him cynical, but it means he’s adept at being ready for sudden change, which is coming for his city, in the form of a riot that will consume the neighborhood, and for his home life, too, presaged by his mother dropping her mask by putting it back on. “I just need to get out some,” his mother says at one point, to which he thinks: “Now that she was lying again, putting it on like lotion, it almost made me feel easier too.”
Hoarding knowledge isn’t having it. Sonny doesn’t understand this, but he will soon. Ultimately, he has to make choices that have moral dimensions, decisions based on what he has seen. What he has heard from people, who tell their stories and fill the air in this swift book like miniature arias. Gradually, their tales take up more and more of the page until Sonny’s own tale is not crowded out but merged with theirs. His separateness is no more. A galaxy is part of the universe, after all, no matter how far it has traveled from the light.•
Join us on May 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Gilb will sit down with host John Freeman and special guest Héctor Tobar to discuss The Flowers. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
