America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo

The novel may be set in an unpicturesque part of the Bay Area – and Hero takes her sweet time to even visit the “glamorous red-bridged seaside city” to the north – but Castillo infuses their fragile queer romance with a luminous naturalism.Īt a time when the US president is making ominous swipes against “chain migration”, the hugely talented Castillo provides a nuanced and persuasive take from the other side. Flashbacks to her stint in the guerrilla insurgency leave us in no doubt about why this is so excruciating for Hero. Despite her broken thumbs, she can manage work in a restaurant thanks to some dextrous adaptations, but it remains to be seen whether she can open her damaged heart to the besotted Rosalyn.

Swapping enthusiasms for manga comics and British indie rock leads in time to red-hot sexual collisions in cars and kitchens. Hero’s new life in America is confined to cleaning Paz’s house and ferrying her daughter Roni to school until she meets a beguiling makeup artist named Rosalyn. Frequently harking back to the privilege of the clan in the Philippines, we feel girded for a panoramic family saga about the disillusionment of the Filipino-American diaspora.Īfter settling on Hero, however, the novel finds its feet, all the better for planting them on modest ground. The American dream offers a salvation myth, which lures seekers to a country where a surgeon like Pol can become a “badly paid security guard at a computer chip company”. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you.” It remains to be seen whether she can open her damaged heart to the besotted Rosalyn For a Filipino generation who spent their lives “dreaming of America, singing its lyrics” the hardships of settling in their adoptive country are powerfully voiced here: “As for loving America or not loving America, these aren’t your problems, either.

In a startling opening riff in the second person, we meet nurse Paz as she makes the leap from the Philippines to the San Francisco Bay Area in the hope of a better life (and so paving the way for new husband Pol, and eventually his niece Hero, to follow on family visas). Heaving with digressive sub-stories, untranslated dialect and jarring gearshifts in style, at first America Is Not the Heart somewhat resembles the hyperactive maximalist fiction that reached its zenith with David Foster Wallace during that decade. Much of the novel is set at the start of 1990s.

America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo