It’s such a small thing the American novelist Oscar Hijuelos has done: just a little twist in the narrative structure of the novel of recollection, too technical on its face to be of much interest to any but the most determined scholar. But with it, Hijuelos–author of last year’s Mr. Ives’ Christmas and the 1990 Pulitzer prize-winner The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love— has completely subverted the contemporary novel of recollection. He has taken modern literature’s favorite device for denying that any moral self stands at the center of a story, and turned it inside out. Oscar Hijuelos has made the most new-fangled sort of novel assert the most old-fashioned sort of moral truth.
To read his four books is to feel a mad exhilaration utterly at odds with their nostalgic, elegiac tone. Who else writing today could do what Hijuelos does in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, presenting Lucille Ball’s husband, Desi Arnaz, as Aristotle’s great-souled man? More to the point, who else writing in America today still believes in the possibility of great- souled men, or has a literary technique that could do more than mock or demean them?
