A lot to convey, but not well executed

More than a hundred pages in, I was still struggling to remember who is who, even though there are not that many protagonists or characters.

The novel is supposed to be a tale of three generations of female Puerto Ricans, whose lives are lived both in Puerto Rico and the USA. The material about their mixed Puerto Rican-American identity in both of these places, across different time periods, is what makes this novel worth reading. One of the protagonists, Rafaela, marries a white American man, Pete Brennan, and they move from San Juan to St Louis, Missouri, in the 1970s, with their 9 year old son and 6 year old daughter. Knowing Rafaela is lonely, Pete purchases membership for his family at an exclusive club, and the very first time he brings his family there, there is a stir because it is a whites only club. When the manager queries whether Mrs Brennan is white, Pete is outraged, not because of the racism, but because of the doubt that his wife would be less than white. Such were the times.

There are several plot lines running in tandem – there is Daisy, a young woman in San Juan who is trying to move there and make her life there. There is Rafaela in St Louis, though she has three plot lines of her own, her past as a school girl, then as a young mother and wife, and her contemporary self as a grandma of Daisy and mother of Ruth. Then there is Ruth’s plotline. It is as if there are half a dozen protagonists instead of 3 women only from 3 generations, so impossible is it to distinguish the characters without their names, as they have no style or voice that makes them distinctive. It is not that there are too many plots and flash backs and characters, not at all, but it is proving too many in this novel for this author lacking the skill not to lose her reader or cause stumbles and constant flipping back to the family tree in the front of the novel, to make sense of what they are reading. (And it is such a simple family tree, there are actually so few characters!)

The writing is much less than could be hoped. Cummins is an author who always has a lot to convey, many opinions and sentiments to communicate, but always seems to struggle with her writing style, which seems to impede rather than be a vehicle of her thoughts. So the reader is often faced with odd sentences like,

She was tall and stately with striking cheekbones, and her white hair had the personality of a skating cloud” (p53-53)

A skating cloud? Clouds skate? Really? Another example of Cummins’ typically awkward writing:

Half the reason for this trip was to try to patch up things with Mom, which efforts so far had not flourished” (p133-4)

– clumsy and perhaps ungrammatical too. Sometimes the turn of phrase is just baffling:

When he reached over to squeeze her fingers, it didn’t feel alarming or romantic, but there was an unlingering tenderness in it” (p341)

– a lingering tenderness would be easy to understand, but what is an”unlingering’ tenderness? Goodness, that must be some squeeze of those fingers, to be able to convey a such a complexity of communications!

Also, although it is indeed commonplace for people to have 2 names, a given name and a nickname, the author needs to be consistent in her narrative usage so as not to confuse the reader, especially at the start of stories, with ambiguously worded sentences. For instance, we have a scene where a mother is being watched dressing for a party by her daughters, and wants to comfort them for not being invited. “

he reached back and squeezed Dolores’ ticklish knee with one hand. Lola squealed. Reclining in her mother’s arms, little Rafa was unconvinced” (p68)

At first reading, I thought there are 3 daughters. It was only later that it occurred to me that Lola is a nickname for Delores, which is natural enough, but in writing, the author needs to be consistent in what she herself calls her characters. It is fine for the mum or the sister to call her both Lola and Delores, but it is confusing when the author swaps willy nilly and calls characters by both their given names and nick names randomly. Cummins does this to other characters too, very confusingly and annoyingly. To add to the confusion, when little Ruth arrives in the US and makes friends, her friends are called Kathy, Jenny and Jennifer. The reader could be forgiven for wondering if this is 2 friends or 3 friends, if Jenny is a shortened version of Jennifer or a whole other person. (For the record, Jenny and Jennifer turn out to be 2 different girls! But go figure!)

Cummins has a tendency to over-write, over-express. When Ruth is annoyed with her son, she thinks,

“Your heritage is contemporary, suburban self-indulgence! She knew that voice was unfair. She muzzled it, duct-taped it, kicked it in the ribs, and threw it off a cliff” (p18)

Sometimes her over-the-top writing can be amusing, such as in this instance, but for most part, it is too sentimental, too over done, too unnecessarily much.

On the plus side however, Cummins has a lot of interesting complexities to unpack within her characters who experience a wide gamut of feelings as mixed race (Puerto Rican, Irish, American, etc) in a society that does not recognise mixed raced people or discriminates against those seen as outsiders, whether it is other Latino people rejecting ‘almost white’ Latinos, or white Americans rejecting Puerto Ricans as ‘foreign’, and even Puerto Ricans migrants putting down other Puerto Rican migrants as ‘jibara’. She also shows how the generations’ self identification shift and change – Ruth insists she is white, having been moved to the US when she was 6 years old. Her daughter and son see themselves as Puerto Rican, and of colour, which infuriates her. Ruth has forgotten her Spanish through not wanting to speak it or remember it. Her brother, Benny, moved back to San Juan and is a fluent speaker, and indeed, he never lost it even when he was moved to US as a child. Ruth’s daughter, Daisy, wants to become fluent in Spanish and to move to San Juan to live, to Ruth’s infuriation.  

In university, Ruth had herself thought of reconnecting with her Puerto Rican side. She goes to Boricua house and is snubbed, called “blanquita”. Ruth is made unwelcome until the girls there were told she was Puerto Rican. The Puerto Rican boyfriend who vouches for her explains,  

“You have to understand where they’re coming from. Most of them grew up here they’re from New Jersey or New York, right? And they’re tight. It’s a tight community. But a lot of them have never even been to Puerto Rico. They’re a hundred percent Puerto Rican, both parents, all four grandparents, whatever. […] To people here in New Jersey? They are Puerto Rican. […] But then Danielle went down there for the first time last summer, to Ponce […] they treated her like garbage. They made fun of her accent. They told her Nuyoricans are a whole different breed” (p299)

Cummins does a great job in teasing out how migrants have whole different sets of angsts of their own, and are neither one homogenous lump nor even necessarily united or mutually sympathetic.

Cummins presents a lovely nuance and spectrum of exclusions and consequently mixed emotions such as pride and shame, fear and hope, anger and grief, all going on at once. Sometimes she explains very nicely how a 13 year old matures from spending her summer away from her home in New York, staying with her cousin and aunt and uncle in San Juan, where the different life gives her a new sense of confidence and removes her previously constant but subconscious fears:

The experience of being there that summer had changed Daisy, engendered in her a more elastic sense of the world around her and her place in it” (p207).

One of the problems with the novel is that at the start, we are told of a horrific accident on the road during a storm, which leaves Daisy in hospital. However, then the rest of the novel intervenes into the plotline, all the back flashes, the histories of Ruth, Rafaela, even Rafela’s mother – no wonder all the women are getting entangled in the reader’s mind – and the Daisy plot loses its urgency and its momentum. For hundreds of pages of the novel, Daisy is just in hospital and unconscious and we do not really see much from that scene. Not the best of plot structures perhaps. The last part of the novel brings everyone to Daisy’s bedside – but by then, the urgency is quite lost, and it is obvious this is just a wrap up, happy-ever-after endings to be justified.

One more problem with the writing is that the characters are not particularly nice ones that have the reader rooting for them. There are novelistic devices which deliberately set out to create characters which are odious or unlikeable, but this is not one of those novels; in fact, it seems this novel wishes to celebrate its wonderful female protagonists as heroic somehow, who are brave and fashionable and desirable. But they come across as largely uncaring, self-centred, and spoilt. Rafaela seems completely self-absorbed, and

would rather be late than leave the house with a chip in her nail polish” (p339).

Cummins seems well aware of the failings of her characters: Rafaela, she tells us, whose childhood had been “downright aristocratic” (p398) did not mean to be a snob but she was one.

[…] she was also arrogant, vain, too aware of her own beauty. She was quick-tempered, haughty, demanding irritable” (p361)

However, Cummins also seems to think the reader should forgive her protagonists anything, which is the problem for this reader. We are expected to still honour and celebrate Ruth even though she had strung two decent, sincere boys along as simultaneous boyfriends because apparently she genetically was able to be in love with two boys at once. We are supposed to find Ruth a admirable for being a fierce, protective mother who is therefore justified in abusing the health care receptionist because she had been unaware of the rules regarding insurance coverage for Daisy in San Juan until the receptionist informed her of it. Cummins seems not to notice the bad behaviour of her protagonists are causing them to be much lesser than the wonderful women she implies they are.

But despite the flaws and shortcomings of the novel, it is still a good read because of the honesty in the way Cummins takes apart the mixed-race identities and individual reactions to the pull of loyalties and cultural identifications, the many in-groupings and exclusions, the vulnerabilities, and the complexities.

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