Straight’s work has been short-listed for the National Book Award and other various prizes. It is pertinent that she dedicates this third volume of the trilogy to her own city of origin, the name of which is not revealed. The inscription reads only: “To my hometown, everyone who left and everyone who stayed behind.”

But whatever Straight’s relationship to Rio Seco, the book does not pretend to be autobiographical. Instead, Straight includes as much as she can of this city’s life – its accents and verbal rhythms, its social strata, its landscapes, flora and fauna – and its limitations as well. She weaves into her scenario portraits of as many of the city’s people as she can: some who seem quiet and home-loving, yet are effectively successful murderers; others who are drug dealers with their flock of eager clients, and others still; the despairing relatives of addicts or their beggared children, whose lives, like teeter-totters, go up and down with the vagaries of addiction’s needs.

As in every community, there are also stable and compassionate citizens who manage to hold their lives together and do what they can for those around them – even if that’s all too often beyond their capabilities. As might be expected, a wide range of emotions and traits is encompassed in their stories. Racism, hostility, the desire for escape, as well as envy and greed, loom large, but so do compassion and generosity, as unexpected and welcome as out-of-season rain.

Susan Straight

Straight brings us within reach of as many of Rio Seco’s citizens as she can in this last volume of her trilogy, confronting us, too, with self-righteous householders who pass their attitudes about race and economic privilege to their children. She even allows us to observe a crew of hard-hat laborers on a construction site, where, on one workday, they encounter a post-adolescent prostitute who’s been mutilated by a client. Some of the laborers indeed do what they can to please themselves, but others attempt to understand and perhaps even to relieve the young woman’s pain. Throughout all these scenarios are woven the images of roving exploiters, passing through what they see as an inferior city, which cannot compare in splendor or complexity to Los Angeles or New York.

The first pages of the novel place the reader in a  dark alleyway, bordered by a taqueria and  a  “Launderland” where rock cocaine is hidden in one of the dryers for convenient sale. A man, whom we meet only as Sidney, who long ago migrated here from Louisiana with his family, comes out of the taqueria holding a bag of tacos when he notices a woman, half kneeling beside a fence under the wild tobacco trees. As often happens in a small city, this woman turns out to be someone he knows; in fact, she is the major subject of all Sidney’s dreams. She too is from Louisiana and has been his ideal woman since their adolescence, long before. And yes, she is still the most beautiful woman among her peers, despite her hopeless addiction to the “rock.” Her name is Glorette Picard, and she was once Sidney’s neighbor in Sarrat, an outlying district of Rio Seco.

She must be on her knees waiting, Sidney thinks. The man would be against the fence, getting his money. Or the drugs. … Glorette had been sprung for years, living here on the Westside, moving from apartment to apartment just ahead of the rent.

But as Sidney continues to watch Glorette, he realizes that she isn’t waiting for a client after all. Her “eyes were open…Her face…upturned, her lips parted like she was having trouble breathing, and her neck curved long and golden.”

The immediate assumption is that Glorette has died of an overdose, but Sidney—who brings her to her family’s home—begins to realize that she might be the victim of a murder. He and others begin to speculate about who would have wanted to kill her, and why.

Among the major figures who surround Glorette’s death are the people who loved her throughout her life and who love her still. Her own two greatest loves are the rock cocaine itself, which she consumed as voraciously as she could; and her son, Victor, who despite the circumstances of his birth and his often terrifying childhood, emerges with a brilliant mind and a sense of loyalty to those who helped him. Young Victor is the third highest achiever in his high school class. As with so many characters throughout the book – particularly the young – this reader finds herself rooting for him, believing that he may be able to escape the limitations of his upbringing, and find his way into the life that he deserves.

What’s wonderful about Straight’s dialogue is that it’s rendered in an inimitable, localized argot, fully comprehensible yet reflective of the speakers’ origins as well as where they may end up. Glorette’s speech is an exciting mixture of the accent of her Louisiana homeland and the argot of Rio Seco’s streets. The mélange of voices in Straight’s work creates a plangent refrain, like a strain of music underlying everything that happens to her characters: their choices, their desires, and their habits, all of which she unflinchingly and compassionately describes.

The locality of which she writes – a painfully dry but beautiful land – is a make-believe but vividly realistic city.  It really does seem as if an invisible river flows as an undercurrent beneath the bargain stores and bars and broken, littered streets, and beneath people’s lives as well. It’s mysterious, this dry, hidden river. How odd it is, that a book so filled with death and violence can end with so much hope. Glorette has died; she is mourned and buried, but the book’s final scene is both startling and fulfilling in its own way, as is the entirety of Between Heaven and Here, this saga of a small, seemingly hopeless city, beneath which, nonetheless, a hidden river runs.

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When a reader first opens Ana Menendez’s latest collection of short fiction, Adios, Happy Homeland, chances are that her expectations may be wildly and immediately overturned. Menendez lives in exile from her native Cuba, but her consciousness and memory seem wedded to her homeland—“happy” or otherwise. Therefore, it makes sense to expect at least a hint of magical realism in the writing, a whiff of the bitter scent of politics, and a few references to the fallen, exiled, and sometimes miraculously resurrected poets of Cuba—past, present, and even, as one might hope, still hanging onto the Cuban archipelago for dear life.

What the reader finds when opening Menendez’s book is even more complex than the anticipated immersion in Cuba’s literary life and history. Ana Menendez’s fiction—her stories, even when disguised as philosophy or poetry or journalism or tongue-in-cheek humor—are always more imaginative, vital, and puzzling than expected. In this collection, most puzzling of all is that each of the pieces appears to have been written by a different person, each of whom bears his/her own vision of the quality of life and of literature in this beautiful but sometimes demon-ridden nation. Each voice expresses a diversity of viewpoints concerning the geography, weather, socio-political development, and history of the “happy homeland” and enhances the presumption that each of the imagined “authors” is a lover of this controversial nation, its climate, topography, and culture. The work is presented in a variety of forms and voices; some of the stories seem to be memoirs, some social or political treatises, and some, excellent examples of contemporary short fiction at its finest. In one such fiction, a woman riding on a train through a nameless country is delayed by an unexpected suicide on the tracks, causing her to re-examine herself, her family loyalties, and her own mortality and values. In another, an elderly woman seems to be living her life backwards, passing through youth into childhood and eventually, into the inarticulate and helpless state of a newborn infant, as if death itself is another kind of beginning, even a rebirth.

Other pieces seem to be out-and-out autobiography or memoir; still others are “stories as poetry” of various kinds, whether or not translated into English or left in the original Spanish. One fiction is written as a kind of puzzle which allows the reader to participate in its creation and form. Others are clearly based on philosophical contemplation, especially a vibrant “story-as-essay” on the joys of flying, “In Defense of Flying.” In this piece, the writer draws on the work both of Epicurus and Schopenhauer, referencing the essence of the alleged author’s own vitality and strength. In particular, the narrator describes her experience and growth through becoming a pilot, despite the disapproval of her relatives and peers.

Ana Menendez

Quite a few of the pieces explore the nature and uses of Cuba’s volatile and penetrating winds and are filled with images of motion and vitality, employing kites, sails, balloons, and parachutes in a brilliant variety of fictional devices. In one of these, “The Parachute Maker,” the inhabitants of an isolated mountain village are talked into learning to sew parachutes by a greedy entrepreneur, with results both catastrophic and miraculous. In another, several young men attempt to escape from Cuba by hiding in the structures of commercial planes, usually with disastrous results, but sometimes with unexpected glory.

Many qualities set this collection apart from the ordinary. Not only does each of these pieces appear to have been written by a different author, even the names and identities of whom seem nationally and culturally diverse; the styles and foci of each narrative also differ widely. The prologue of the book is ostensibly written by an Irishman, who in the loneliness of his own childhood came upon a book about Cuba which filled him with a lifelong passion for the country. The next story, written by another “writer” in an entirely different voice, unfolds around the quandary of a terrified man in an ever-more crowded railroad station, who believes that he is being stalked by two strange men. This Kafka-esque nightmare, however, is followed by a series of ironic—often very funny—pieces which are apparently based on the predicament of Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old boy who escaped Cuba on a raft with his mother and her lover, both of whom drowned. The string of stories concerning Elian’s ambivalent situation are ‘narrated’ by an exiled Cuban woman working in Miami for a group which is doing all it can to ‘rescue’ the boy from his own father—and of course, failing. (Actually, the Cuban government has just released an announcement of Elian’s 19^th birthday, telling the world that he seems quite content although, as the U.S. news reported, “rather quiet.” )

Owing to the ostensible variety of authors in this collection, these stories are remarkably diverse, both in content and in point of view. Perhaps, too, some of Menendez’s own intentions are too complex to state directly; a reader might speculate that she is using images of wind and flight to indicate a sense of freedom—or of the longing for freedom—which might be haunting the Cuban people, although nothing of the kind is expressly stated. It is, however, with the help of the wind that a variety of the characters find the freedom they seek from their homeland. In one such story, the sight of a balloon floating overhead seems to release a persecuted man from his fears; in another, a youth makes his escape from Cuba and then from Miami with the use of a parachute, a surfboard, and a golden kite.

The most wonderful thing about this collection is that each story seems to tie directly into those which precede or follow. There is no intentional obfuscation or confusion; Menendez’s writing is crystal clear. She has both the courage and the vitality to evoke many diverse voices in such a convincing way. It’s a joy to read such uncluttered, unabashed, and vivid prose, and to penetrate more deeply into contemporary Cuba’s still unrevealed heart.

Read the Rumpus Interview with Ana Menendez

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Rancho Armadillo, both subject and locale of Judith Stephens’s recently published saga by that name, is a fictional commune which rises and falls during the last four decades of the 20^th century. Whether the commune and its inhabitants actually existed in what we like to call the “real world” between 1960 and 2000 is debatable, but Stephens’s vision of their escapades is almost always both thought-provoking and savagely funny—a meritorious feat of literary sleight-of-hand.

The book, set in the forbidding, and beautiful, reaches of New Mexico’s volcanic mountains, can be taken as a composite portrait of the ideals and idiosyncrasies of a generation of young—or young-ish—Americans, and the social institutions they either invented or borrowed from other cultures and times. A ramshackle but vital community, Rancho Armadillo’s inhabitants and their hapless offspring, expats from a society rooted in sexual shame and greed, long to be motivated and transformed. Instead, their lives frequently reveal the very flaws of the society from which they’re trying to escape.

In this novel-in-stories, Stephens invites readers to make their own discoveries about communal life, rather than arriving at any predictable conclusions. Can a life based on rural poverty, animal husbandry, and the kind of love which is self-described as “free” but seems to come with the usual price tags, really guarantee serenity? Despite the success of other communities, (like the mythical “Fanghorn,” in which the residents were rumored to have meditated amongst their cabbages with miraculous results), Stephens’s answer appears to be a resounding “No.” Still, there are no predetermined expectations in Rancho Armadillo—the residents of the commune, like the reader, are persuaded to arrive at their own answers.

Judith Stephens

Example: although these new pioneers may have turned their backs on “mainstream” society, it often seems as if the same old inequities still exist between labor and management, men and women, children and adults, and, ultimately, humans and animals. All is presented to the reader with gusto—or at least with recognition—as Stephens steers the triumphs and peccadilloes of the pioneers’ lives backward and forward through time. With skill and wit, she manages to coordinate their experiences into a convincing though sometimes ragged whole. Among the Armadillo’s “stars” are the prototypical hippie queen who loves to dash around in front of everyone, including her own pre-pubescent daughter, with nothing on but a few smears of mud—but who finds it increasingly difficult to find, or keep, a satisfactory mate. Other casualties of that particular war are almost-grown children who may not have outlived early abuse; minds that explode from drugs or self-delusion; and at least one pair of budding artists who experience despair when they discover that, even in this alternative society, their finest work is insufficiently valued. Just as they did back in New York, they have to resort to forgery to survive.

In one sequence, the Armadillo’s communards debate the possible slaughter of their geriatric, non-egg-laying chickens, each faction displaying its own idiosyncratic reasoning—vegetarian vs. non-vegetarian. The dispute ends in a free-for-all when a non-vegetarian suggests an across-the-board massacre of all the old hens (who are named for the heroines in Euripides’ The Trojan Women), because of his own unsatisfied longing for a fried chicken feast.

Of course, one of the communal vegetarians, more familiar with the vagaries of poultry than the hungry meat-eater, points out that geriatric chickens are totally inedible, and the Armadillo’s pundits are forced to debate methods of disposal for these elegantly named hens and/or their carcasses. Emotions run high, various accusations are leveled. The battle ends in a precarious truce; the communards construct a luxurious new chicken coop, buy a flock of egg-laying adolescents, and leave the new and old hens in a state of peaceful coexistence. As it turns out, however, the old chickens—Cassandra, Helen, Andromache, and their cohorts—gang up on the unlucky new ones and try to peck them to death. Chickens, as one sage communard points out, are “not rational beings.”

Like the chickens and their human counterparts, many different kinds of livestock rebel when treated less than gently. Cows revolt against being milked, ripping up fence-lines and pronging their caretakers with untrimmed horns; swine sink into uncharacteristic savagery when deprived of nourishment, revealing the deeply symbiotic relationship between humans and at least some of their food sources. The linked chapters of Rancho Armadillo occur not so much chronologically as at various decisive moments in the characters’ lives and in the overall existence of the commune itself. No matter the outcome of each situation, the author is never at a loss for microscopic and vividly funny observation of all her characters’ traits, obsessions, and discoveries.

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