Drift

Manuel Luis Martinez
(Text) $23.95 PB

Drift, Martinez' second novel, was released in the United States in May this year, where it was received with almost total approval by the critics, being both intellectually fashionable as a glimpse into an ethnic minority, and effective as an entertaining, engaging story. Thanks to keen culture-scouts at Text Publishing, we now have our own, locally-produced edition. Hopefully Australian readers will not be put off by the blurb Text are using to promote the book, which somewhat over-emphasises the sensational (drugs and violence) aspects of the story, at the expense of its many other layers.

Drift is an emotive, almost melodramatic first-person narrative from the perspective of 16-year old Roberto Lomos. Roberto is growing up in the Chicano (Mexican-American) community of West-side San Antonio, Texas. His family has split apart some two years before the beginning of the novel - first his father leaving, then his mother having a nervous breakdown and being taken away to Los Angeles by her sister. This leaves Roberto without any immediate family, looked after instead by his hard-working, devoutly Catholic grandmother.

Roberto gives us plenty of hints that the loss of his family, especially the rejection implicit in his mother's departure, is the main source of pain behind his hopelessly misguided, self-destructive adventures. His mother has become deeply depressed, lacking in any willpower, thus allowing herself and her younger son Anthony to be dragged away by her domineering sister. Meanwhile Roberto is considered too difficult, too like his treacherous father, to be included in this remodelled family. But he is so besotted by his mother's memory that he cannot be angry at her, while his youthful pride prevents him from showing how hurt he is.

Parental abandonment is only one part of Roberto's problems: his lack of money, social status, or educational achievement means that the adulthood thrust upon him is a far-from-promising prospect. He works in fast-food joints, on construction sites, he works for Mexicans and White men, neither of whom give him the slightest respect. At age 16 he is already being boxed-in to the life of a poor, uneducated Chicano - a burro (donkey), as his Grandmother describes it. Her love and patience provide the only stabilising force in Roberto's life, even though her religious admonitions do more to fuel his stoned paranoia than to give him any sense of purpose.

'Sense of purpose' is always misplaced, tragic, and destructive in this story. It is the best the protagonist can do to escape the absolute drift in which his itinerant father lives. The first-person voice is extremely effective at creating intimacy between us and Roberto. It also makes the tragic turns of the novel more poignant - we see through his adolescent thought-processes to realise things about him before he does. He has something of the alienated melancholy of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, and something of the total desperation of Ari in Loaded. But his narrative also has a concrete, socio-economic edge, giving us an insider's perspective into the day-to-day lives of a particular community, a group whose access to the American ideals of equality and opportunity seems decidedly limited.

Review by John Mansfield