Slighcarp and Grimshaw

Had I the chance to do it over again, I’m not sure I’d pick a modern noir as the first novel I taught to my students. Add a labyrinthine plot and dialogue written in reference-heavy urban dialect to a class of sometimes disgruntled, more likely than not learning disabled students and the result is a bit of a slog. Many of my students loved the book–a particular sweetie became my Bodega Dreams expert he was so into it–and the looks on my students’ faces when the conspiracy is revealed and certain characters are murdered was worth a lot of the pain involved in getting to the end of the book.

I promised a post a very, very long time ago about my issues with Bodega Dreams. Here I will attempt to talk about some of those issues, though seeing as how I haven’t thought about the book in a critical manner nor exercised my critical facilities in months, the going could be as rough as my students’.

So, let me first say that on the whole, Bodega Dreams is a lively, entertaining book with a social conscience blah blah blah. It’s a good book that most readers would likely enjoy reading quite a bit. Ernesto Quinonez has an excellent ear for dialogue: “When I’m in a fight, whass close to my mouth is mine by right and my teeth ain’t no fucken pawnshop.” He’s also clever: the novel is a satisfying noir, with the pieces clicking together in that way they do in noirs, unexpected and expected at the same time. And if you didn’t know what Spanish Harlem looked like, smelled like and sounded like before you read the book, you most certainly would at the end of it.

Bodega Dreams is also, unmistakably, a first novel. Another teacher told me it was wonderful to teach because Quinonez hits all those major literary elements kids should be aware of. (Sidenote: turns out high schoolers don’t know anything. You have to teach them what a simile is, what imagery is, what plot is. Seems like that should be amazing, that they should know so little, but it turns out that teaching them all those things is in fact my job.) The book is filled with imagery, symbolism, plot, characterization, similes and metaphors and probably some other things kids should be able to identify and analyze.

That all being said, when I started looking closely at the book for which parts to pull out, the slapdash construction of the novel on the micro level became apparent. In the very first chapter–or “round” as Quinonez calls his chapters–the narrator Julio spends a fair amount of time discussing the importance of acquiring a street name and how you have to fight to get a name. You know, because you aren’t anyone if you don’t have a name. Then he rolls off on a tangent about what Spanish Harlem looks like (that aforementioned vivid imagery of the neighborhood), then a vignette about the nightmarish junior high he attended. Only after this three-page diversion does Julio tell us what name he finally earned and then he tells a few more anecdotes about other guys nicknames.

Adore Bodega Dreams as I do, if only because I had to be passionate about it for the three months I was teaching it, well-constructed it is not. Reading it at the same time as The House on Mango Street, which becomes ever-more perfect the more you read and inspect it, the freshman effort it is was impossible to miss.

Photograph of a bodega courtesy of benben and his Creative Commons license. Thanks.