'Glass' Chronicles Mexican Immigrants

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MELISSA BLOCK, host:

Poets often use many words to say a simple thing. That line from the song "Fly Me to the Moon" sums up the problem some poets face when they turn to long-form fiction.

That's the situation at least for poet Jimmy Santiago Baca according to our reviewer Alan Cheuse. Alan says Baca has overwritten in writing his first novel, "A Glass of Water."

ALAN CHEUSE: A husband and wife, Casimiro and Nopal, and their two sons Lorenzo and Vito, cross over from Mexico into the U.S. and try to make a life there. Out of this, Baca tries to make a novel. Sometimes he employs lyrical verse of language. Sometimes he uses fragments of scenes and fluid, naturalistic sequences. He does all of it in such an amateurish way that he seems to be working out his aesthetic problems right there in front of us on the page.

The parents, Casimiro and Nopal, though earnest and honest, both come to bad ends. Casimiro is felled by a stroke and Nopal is murdered after a rape. Their two boys, Lorenzo and Vito, make their own way. Lorenzo works the land and gets involved with Carmen, who's studying migrant workers. Vito becomes a prizefighter filled with talent and rage.

The entire book goes back and forth, sometimes in short scenes of the rape of Nopal and out of Vito's boxing career that work beautifully. At other times, in summary and less than coherent lyrical response from the dead mother, or the mind of the incapacitated father.

In other words, a poet has made a mess of a novel. But sometimes he does it in glorious fashion. As in the moment - poets do best with moments, not with linear narratives - when Lorenzo approaches Carmen in the fields. Her hair smelled like clear blue sky along the river, we hear. Her breath like cottonwood leaves. And then there was a hush as she groaned, then silence followed as she shivered, a reverent quiet shiver as if monks were chanting music from within her, stirring in his soul a sense of ancient belonging.

BLOCK: The novel is "A Glass of Water" by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Our reviewer is Alan Cheuse.

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