Monkey Boy

April 1, 2021

In 2011, Goldman released the heartbreaking autobiographical novel Say Her Name to wide acclaim. That same year, he also released The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle, a work of immersive journalism that followed him through the streets of Mexico City as he grappled with grief and the city's infamous traffic. Goldman's newest autobiographical novel draws from his own life's story to muse on the divided self and the fragments of the past that point to our uncertain future. Francisco Goldberg, the narrator, is in search of himself. Returning to his hometown of Boston to visit his aging mother, Goldberg begins to probe his own identity, his relationship with his abusive father, and his mother's numerous secrets. Unfolding in stories and memories, the narrative oscillates among Goldberg's upbringing in suburban Boston, his family's history in Guatemala, and his recent return to New York City. Fusing elements of creative nonfiction with autoethnography, Francisco Goldman creates the speculative ghost of a parallel life in Francisco Goldberg. VERDICT Fans of Goldman's bibliography will find much to delight in here.--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

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Starred review from March 1, 2021
During a five-day visit to his hometown of Boston, a writer attempts to fit together the pieces of his own past, his mother's, and that of her native Guatemala. "I wish I could remember every single second of my entire life so far, in full 3-D Technicolor and surround sound, and at every past scene re-inhabit myself exactly as I was." This is the yearning of Francisco Goldberg, Goldman's fictional alter ego in an autobiographical novel that touches on some of the same ground as his magical, prizewinning debut, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992). Frankie, as he was called in his youth (along with Monkey Boy and other unpleasantries), has returned to Boston to have dinner with a high school girlfriend, occasioning an avalanche of memories of his classmates' racism, his father's violence, and his breach with his only sister but also sweeter recollections of his relationships with the series of young Guatemalan women who were sent by his Abuelita to help his mother around the house. He arranges to meet with two of them and pays several visits to his mother at her nursing home, a tin of her favorite French butter cookies in hand. They play a very lenient bilingual version of Scrabble as he wheedles out long-missing details about her ancestry, her marriage, other men in her past. His Mamita may not have the memory she once did, but that's not the only reason she hesitates. She's read that first novel of his, too. "This is why I never want to tell you anything, because you take just a little thread of truth and pull on it and out comes a made-up story." Goldman's--or Goldberg's?--immersive, restless narrative style expertly plays the rhythms of thought and remembrance, weaving in his past and current romances, his investigation of and published work on Guatemalan terror, ultimately the quest for a whole made of so many halves: half Jewish, half Catholic, half American, half Guatemalan, half White, half Latino.... The warmth and humanity of Goldman's storytelling are impossible to resist.

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Starred review from April 15, 2021
Goldman's alter-ego protagonist, journalist Francisco Goldberg, the son of a sharp-witted, long-suffering, upper-class Guatemalan mother and an angry, violently abusive, Jewish scientist father, had been covering harrowing human-rights stories in Central America until his revelations put him in danger. At the start of this labyrinthine novel of memories and reflections, Francisco is on his way to Boston to visit his mother in a nursing home. As in his Say Her Name (2011), novelist and journalist Goldman fuses autobiography and invention to create fiction of nearly nuclear intensity. Francisco recalls being beaten by his father, bullied in school and called Monkey Boy, and the endless barrage of racism and anti-Semitism that makes him a perpetual outsider. He recounts his parents' gripping stories rooted in historic horrors and laced with paradox and pain, love affairs, and, widening the lens, riveting tales of WWII and the vicious civil war in Guatemala. This is a journalist's notebook and an artist's sketchbook--every detail vivid and meaningful, every captivating character a portal into the struggle for freedom and dignity. Although steeped in trauma and loneliness, prejudice and brutality, secrets and lies, Goldman's ravishing, multidirectional novel is also iridescent with tenderness, comedic absurdity, sensual infatuation, reclaimed love, the life-sustaining desire to "remember every single second," and the redemption of getting every element just right.

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