When I was young, I went through a stage during which my primary reading material was the oeuvre of Fern Michaels. She is known for writing romances and thrillers, but my favorite was her “Kentucky” series, which outlines the melodramatic lives of a family of female horse-breeders.
The novels are trashy, but since Kentucky was as foreign to me as Europe and Africa, it didn’t matter. Reading her took me far away from my quotidian private-school life.
Anthony De Sa’s first book, the story collection Barnacle Love, appeals to that same side of me in a decidedly more mature way. Immigrant literature is Fern Michaels for the literary crowd. It takes you to a new locale: the space between countries where immigrants reside.
Barnacle Love is written as a testament to the immigrant experience, through the lens of a Portuguese-Canadian family, the Rebelos. This family exists in a universe of geographic and cultural displacement. The first part of the book documents the arrival of Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman, in Toronto. The second part is devoted to the development of his son, as Manuel drinks to excess.
The family clings to structure, to stability. In “Urban Angel,” Manuel gets a crummy job in a hospital. De Sa examines at once the humility and the pride—the homesickness and the patriotism—that define immigrant life.
“Leave Portuguese things back home for the old to die with,” is Manuel’s mantra. The reader cannot help but agree with him. “Portuguese things” include a gruesome final act by Manuel’s sister against their mother, when she smears the mother’s corpse with lipstick and “ram[s] the tube between the dead woman’s hands.” There is always discord between family members, tension between generations as the chasm separating them widens.
I want to love the book for its exaggerated characters, like the vengeful sister. But a greater problem—De Sa’s tendency to melodrama—undermines his gifts as a literary writer. Some stories are so overstuffed with heavy-handed motifs, metaphors, and the insistence of overarching themes that they feel contrived. When the Rebelos eat out at a Chinese restaurant, they ask the waiter to make the resident canaries be quiet. The waiter answers: “Sometimes beautiful song cover up deep hurt.” As a reader, I’m suspicious of that waiter. The sentimentality only makes me doubt De Sa’s sincerity.
It is sadly paradoxical that Barnacle Love should come off this way. It is well-researched; it contains wonderful descriptions; characters have distinct personalities and idiosyncrasies. About a wedding dress, he writes, “They would wiggle their hips to allow the communal dress to sit as well as it could before it was unstitched, pinned, and stitched and seamed again for that week’s bride.” Such quiet details illuminate De Sa’s talent and the originality of his voice. A writer of his caliber should never take the Fern Michaels route.
Tobias Atkin has published poetry in the Claremont Review.
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i can’t believe this review–talk about seizing on the insignificant molehill and rendering it an irrelevant K2!
da sa’s collection sketches with heartbreaking poignancy the chasm between youthful dreams and ambitions, and the disappointments that accrue with adulthood. he gives us insight into another place and culture, and the compromises immigrants have always had to make. he gives us history, remembering emanuel jacques. he gives us the coming-of-age around the butchering of a pig…he took me many places i’d never been. and i was grateful.
a quick google shows me fern michaels has published at least 32 books since 1977–more if she uses pseudonyms. which wouldn’t be surprising, given the kind of formulaic trash the books seem to be. not that there’s anything wrong with that–i enjoy dan brown and stephenie meyer as much as the next person.
but really, comparing da sa’s work with michaels’…to borrow irving layton’s dismissal of an unauthorized biographer, i fear atkin wouldn’t know a poem from a potato.