GEOGRAPHIES OF HOME
Loida Maritza Pérez
Viking
$23.95
324 pages

Oh, what a temptation it is for first-time novelists to us their own growing-up experiences as material for their first-time novels! After all, it is often a brooding desire to get this family angst off their chests that brought these folks to writing careers in the first place. However, there ought to be a sign hung beside the door of every novel-writing course in the country: "Deposit in the box below all ideas, suggestions, character sketches, plotlines, etc. pertaining to autobiographical coming-of-age stories. May not be retrieved until prospective author has submitted two completed books." Otherwise, such writers risk squandering some of their best material at a time when they are least able to handle their craft.

Dominican American first-time novelist Loida Maritza Pérez gives both an achingly self-reflective vision and a workmanlike writing effort to "Geographies of Home," but it is hard to read this novel without wishing she had developed her skills a bit more before sitting down to produce this story.

"Geographies" revolves around Iliana, a young New York woman who drops out of college to return to Brooklyn to the home of her Dominican immigrant parents. Any doubt that the character of Iliana is taken directly from Pérez herself is dissipated by flipping between the author’s dustjacket picture and descriptions of the main character: "She gazed disparagingly at her broad shoulders, meager breasts, narrow hips and excessively long arms. ... Her lips, with their tendency to curve down, seemed unkind. Her wide-set eyes and the arch of her unruly brows made her appear somewhat mad."

Iliana believes that by returning to her parents’ house, she can "help with all the shit going on at home. ... Hell is breaking loose at home!" Hell, indeed. One sister is a paranoid-schizophrenic who attempts to burn the house down to get rid of spiders, and scours her own body with Brillo pads and sprays it with Lysol to banish the residue of a long-ago rape. A younger brother must keep a padlock on his door to prevent her from attacking him in the night. Another sister, physically abused and virutally abandoned by her husband in an apartment filled with chickens and accumulated garbage, has also returned home with her three near-starving children. Iliana’s mother hopes the family chaos will all go away if she only pretends it does not exist; her father seeks simultaneous denial and redemption in the strict fundamentalism of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Everywhere, the magic-dream ambitions of the family’s Dominican past slams headlong against the unforgiving brownstone of its Brooklyn reality. Drawing a narrative out of this family experience would be an ambitious mix for any novelist.

Pérez often mixes it well, especially when she brings forth language reminiscent of a musical chant, as when Iliana’s mother appears to shape-shift before her eyes on a Brooklyn street:

"Aurelia’s eyes had narrowed to mere slits and darkened to an impenetrable black that hypnotized its prey. She swooped toward her eldest daughter, her legs appearing to glide rather than to walk, her neck stretching forward from shoulders broad with strength. ... The scratches clawed into her face faded even as her lips--thinned by years of biting down on them to force their silence--appeared to beak, then exhaled steam that evaporated in cold air suddenly smelling of rain-washed grass although there was not a speck of green anywhere in sight."

But good language and great premises are not enough to sustain a narrative line through a 300-plus page novel. Perez’ ambitious challenge in "Geographies" is to explain the family’s present difficulties through Dominican references; her solution is the use of extensive flashback, for which the author has not yet developed a comfortable rhythm. Her technique is to often interrupt dramatic points in her narrative with stories of crises of the past. It is a habit as annoying as coming home to tell your father about a horiffic car wreck you just witnessed on the corner, only to have him say, "Oh, that’s nothing. I can remember, one time, a 30-car pileup on the Cross Bronx Expressway." The timeline becomes so convoluted that at one point, Pérez is forced to establish a time frame by beginning a scene with the amateur’s solution of "on this particular Sabbath..." The phrase could have, and should have, been easily red-penned out on the editor’s desk. But the problem lay in the author’s overall conception of the entire novel, something a red pen by itself won’t cure.

There are other problems with "Geographies," including the author’s tendency to tell rather than show and a limp-to-the-finish ending that suggests she was too exhausted by her fierce introspection to think out a decent conclusion. Still, Pérez’ writing style shows flashes of some of the best of contemporary Caribbean and Latin American novelists: Isabelle Allende, Edwidge Danticat, and Maryse Condé. And for all its flaws, "Geographies of Home" presents an intriguing glimpse of an Afro-Dominican world long ignored in English-language literature. There is hope that Loida Maritza Pérez will take the time to develop the skills to present it properly.