The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Loverboys by Ana CastilloBrian Evenson
Ana Castillo. Loverboys. Norton, 1996. 224 pp. $21.00.
As one of the more accomplished of Latina writers, Castillo is often able to paint a vivid image of characters and the way in which they are affected by their sense of who they are and what their cultures tell them to be. Nevertheless, despite the fact that many of its individual stories are successful, Loverboys is interesting less for the stories taken separately than for the resonances that begin to become established between stories.
As intriguing as the book’s culture depictions is the complex way in which gender and desire are figured and refigured from story to story. We have desire of all types, heterosexual and homosexual, from women who flirt with other women despite feeling themselves largely heterosexual, to the lesbian in the title story who finds herself drawn irresistibly to a young man. With the stories often showing passage from gay to straight relationships or vice versa, with the characters often torn between different desires, sexuality is envisioned as fluid. Sometimes this is echoed culturally when characters seem to experience similar fluidity in terms of possessing a social identity that makes multiple claims on the individual.
In addition to providing a number of stories that fit fairly snugly into our sense of what a conventional story is or does, Castillo also offers some that quietly test the boundaries. The three paragraph “A Kiss Errant,” for instance, reduces a relationship to a single gesture. Others, like “Crawfish Love,” seem to break off just as the story is beginning. “If Not for the Blessing of a Son” ends where it begins, the story cyclic in a way that suggests its enormous hidden secret. While some of the stories stumble—such as “Who Was Juana Gallo?” which telegraphs its ending or “A Lifetime” which risks sentimentality—few fall on their faces, and the other, stronger stories keep the collection moving forward. [Brian Evenson]