The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Woodcuts of Women by Dagoberto Gilb
Peter Donahue

Dagoberto Gilb. Woodcuts of Women. Grove, 2001. 167 pp. $23.00.

With Woodcuts of Women, Dagoberto Gilb builds on and broadens his storytelling repertoire, which also includes The Magic of Blood, stories, and The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, a novel. The ten stories in this collection depict men in various relationships with women, from poolside pickup to married with kids. Yet these are not tales of cliché machismo or male posturing. Rather, each narrative explores the often elaborate, sometimes perplexing interactions between men and women. In “Maria de Covina” an eighteen-year-old juggles his fears, flirtations, and affairs with the several women, young and old, who come into his life while he works in a department store. The narrator of “Mayela One Day in 1989” tours El Paso’s narrow side streets and queer bars with mysterious Mayela—”red dress and wavy black hair and a blue, cloudless sky, as Mexican as cheap paint, that halos her”—who attracts the keen interest of men and women alike. Sex matters to the men in these stories, though not in a lascivious way. Rather, it’s part of the complex company of women. All of the stories, with one exception, depict life along “the Mexican-Chicano border.” The characters’ code-switching speech is as integral to place as the region’s arid heat. “The Pillows” offers a paean to El Paso: “The compact El Paso downtown, and the darkened slot that was the concreted Rio Grande, and Ciudad Juárez beyond that, and then the blackened plain of the desert.” Throughout Woodcuts of Women, Gilb’s prose is sure and unpretentious, the voices real. The stories develop character and reveal situation in a wise, rigorous, questioning, and often good-humored manner indicative of a fiction writer working at the height of his craft. [Peter Donahue]