Review: Taína

Taína by Ernesto Quiñonez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I spent a lot of time enjoying, thinking about, and teaching Quinonez’s first novel, Bodega Dreams, in the years after it first came out. That was a sometimes-too-faithful reimagining of The Great Gatsby in a Latinx context, and part of the fun of it was seeing the ways Quinonez played with his source material to reflect his own different ambitions and cultural context.

This one, his third, seems to me to rewrite another, even more famous story: the account of Mary as she conceives and gives birth to Jesus.

Quinonez’s tone here largely pulls off what could be a difficult sell. Our hero, Julio, is a bit of a visionary to begin with. His mother thinks he might be insane, but he isn’t – or, at worst, he’s only gently so.

Julio becomes convinced that his neighbor Taina, a beautiful 15-year-old girl, has become pregnant through immaculate conception. He wants so badly to believe her, that he ‘conceives’ of his own notion for how it’s happened: an elaborate explanation involving his partial understanding of quantum physics and the uncertainty of matter at the atomic level.

It’s a charming situation, but it’s also more than that. Julio does in some ways worship Taina, his Mary, and he gradually becomes a modern-day Joseph. He’s happy to be a supporting character in her story, and he even turns to a petty dognapping scheme to raise money so she he can provide for her.

In a twist that’s a lot of fun, though possibly a [SPOILER:] Taina, who doesn’t speak for half the novel, turns out to be foul-mouthed and ungrateful. She shouts at him as he brings her presents, finding fault with everything he does, whether his choice of pizza restaurant, his failure to bring her soda, his forgetting to get her gum, or his general emoting of smitten puppy.

The result, I’d say, is a more mature working from source material for Quinonez. He seems less burdened by echoing something like Gatsby, and instead he more intent on suggesting the nature of the experience of the community he’s studying. There’s something very funny in Taina’s tantrums, something that suggests a playful exploration of the boundaries of matriarchy. (And, indeed, the women here are all the strongest characters.) The men here, whether Julio’s unemployed father, Taina’s ex-convict uncle, or Julio himself, can’t get it together to accomplish much. They are dependent on the women they know, and they want, in the end, mostly to serve them.

I hope that aspect of the story isn’t so much a fantasy, but much of the rest of this is. Taina’s mother insists that only a Puerto Rican spirit-woman can solve the mystery of Taina’s pregnancy and restore their family to something like stability. [SPOILER:] Peta Ponce does turn out to have what seem to be real powers, and the story she retrieves about her version of the conception (one involving a fight between two doves, one slightly whiter than the other) is lyrical and moving. (It also sets up the possibility that the white dove that does succeed in fathering the unborn infant – to be named Usmail after the U.S. Mail of the postbox across the street – represents one of Julio’s rivals (maybe the thuggish Mario) and suggests that he tried and failed to have the privilege.

Instead, what does restore the family – both families, really – to stability is a capacity for accepting one another. Julio is the hero here for his deep faith in Taina, and she emerges as a more likeable figure as she gradually does come to love him back. This isn’t a story of a man overcoming a woman’s reluctance as much as it is the story of a man coming to be appreciated for the way he makes a possible home for a woman independent of her initial feelings for him. He does what he does without expectation of a reward, so their gradually becoming a couple has a quiet sweetness to it.

I gather some readers have complained that this ends abruptly. While it is true that we never learn the fate of Julio after he’s charged with the dog theft, there’s something fitting about the way this wraps up. Julio dreams of a future where his world turns around Usmail, but he remains in a present where he is doing all he can to help Taina. He’s a would-be savior of a woman who’s strong enough not to need him, one whose beautiful voice makes him experience something like prayer when he hears her sing.

Many parts of this don’t quite line up, and that seems part of Quinonez’s plan. There’s a humor that moves beyond either Bodega Dreams or the second novel, Chango’s Fire. This is a new Quinonez, one ever more able to tell his own story.

I like this, and, since he is coming to my campus for a visit, I am glad for the chance to hear about what he has planned next.


View all my reviews