BOOK REVIEW: MONSTRESS
Confession: Every time I get my hands on an anthology, I judge its worth on the basis of three stories. I decide whether I should read the entire collection on the strength of the first, second-to-the-last, and the last stories only. If the title story is not in any of these places, I’ll read four. I don’t know if editors really locate the strongest stories in this order, but it works for me. Given my hectic day job I don’t have much time to read, so better to have a method of predicting max payoff before diving in.
In the case of Monstress by Lysley Tenorio, the first story is the title story, and it is a nice, quick read. The narrator Reva Gogo is an actress and dental assistant who has played Squid Mother, Werewolf Girl, and Bat-Winged Pygmy Queen in Filipino horror flicks. These B-movies are made by an Ed-Wood-like character named Checkers Rosario (good attempt to create a memorable character name; is Tenorio doing a Thomas Pynchon here?). After successive box-office failures in the Philippines, Reva and Checkers are led to the US by a kindred auteur who plies the same genre. Later Reva has to choose between Checkers and a career without prosthetics. I was readying myself for a big twist or a staggering resolution, but was led instead to a natural, practical ending. Still, the last two paragraphs are as emotionally-wrenching as love stories can get.
The second-to-the-last story is called the Save the iHotel. My wife says it’s like Brokeback Mountain, but with a less sad ending. The characters are two old men—one more senile than the other—who about to be removed from the hotel, which is scheduled for demolition. Just before the eviction the younger one recounts how they met and how betrayals led to the losses that ripple between and around them.
The last piece is L’Amour, CA, which has an “ordinary” immigrant Pinoy family plot. I say ordinary because there are the usual plot points—unwanted pregnancies, bullying, and the other ‘expected’ turns of the immigrant experience. But the story still has a good start and a powerful ending.
The three convinced me to finish the whole book, so I continued with Help, probably the lightest in the collection. It features an Imelda vs. Beatles plan hatched by a government employee/devotee and his nieces. It describes perfectly Imelda’s menacing hold over the Manileños during the 70′s. There’s even an elegant description of a painting of Madame, which made me remember the painting that’s supposed to welcome patients to the Heart Center in East Avenue. I think she’s supposed to be Eve in that painting, but to my 9-year-old self, seeing her face and smelling the hospital odor while stricken with rheumatic fever was dreadful.
There’s also an attempt at a geek story entitled Superassassin, but I don’t think this piece works.
And then Brothers, a good story about a divorced Pinoy immigrant, his mom, and a sibling who elects to have breast implants and a sex change. Felix Starro and View from Culion are the weakest stories in the collection. (These two, by the way, are located in the middle of the book; my method might be sound after all).
I think all the stories are blatantly plot-driven, and there’s nothing wrong with that. All can be easily adapted into episodes of Maalaala Mo Kaya or a GMA telesine. Not those ones where a character is simply killed off to get the tears flowing, but the good, solid episodes that the networks are still capable of churning out from time to time.
And the book is a good, solid collection, all the stories merging into a coherent whole. I’ve stumbled upon two separate comments by Franzen and Wolff declaring that short stories can approach perfection (unlike the novel, which can never be perfect). Junot Diaz has crafted some stories approaching perfection in Drown, and because of a similar diaspora theme, Tenorio might be compared to Junot Diaz. Diaz has already established his trademark tone, he would be a tough act to follow. I won’t expand on this and be caught pretending to know more about literary criticism that I do. I will just say that the two perfect Pinoy-written shorts are Utos ng Hari and Sulat Mula sa Pritil, and I think Tenorio is capable of writing something that approaches the Pritil and Hari.
If I can be allowed one objection though, I think most of these stories are bleak. For this reason, you shouldn’t read the entire book in one sitting, because it might tire you out. There are some funny, amusing accounts, but then they are followed by passages like “it seems impossible to me that anyone could be that pleased in life,” which brings the atmosphere back to bleakness.
If I can be allowed two objections, I think a good editor can still improve on the stories. The blurbs imply that some of these pieces have been in existence for years. If there was some last-minute editing before book publication, I would have wished for cuts—not necessarily in the tradition of Carver and Lish—but just some lines probably better left unsaid, and overused metaphors like “the room is like a dream.”
Good debut by a Filipino-American writer. The book is worth your time.
(review edited by Jessica Zafra)
