Can you recall that time in your life when you first
encountered the world on your own, when your eagerness fought with
your shyness, and friends and books and music and movies seemed
vital sources not just of amusement but of new, remarkable, and
attainable lives? If you can’t, The Empanada
Brotherhood, the 11th novel by acclaimed New Mexico
author John Nichols, will give you back those years, with interest.
“Blondie,” the novel’s self-effacing narrator, has come
to Greenwich Village in 1960, determined to become a writer but
uncertain of both his craft and his proper subjects. He falls in
with a disparate band of characters, most of them Argentines, whose
perplexities, struggles, occasional joys and more frequent
disasters he shares. Together they patronize a small
empanada stand.
The stand’s operator,
Aureo Roldan, serves as a surrogate father to his “customers.” In
his travels through a world he sums up as “a truly remarkable
pigpen,” Roldan has adopted a sort of Christian Marxism. When he
closes his stand for Thanksgiving Day, he tapes this message to the
shutter: “DAY OF THANKS. Come upstairs if you are hungry. There is
safety in numbers.” But the community he fosters quickly disperses
when he has to flee his mob creditors, and “Blondie” is left
feeling both bereft and enriched.
The adventures of a young person coming of age have been described
in approximately 1 million other novels. But Nichols makes this old
theme live again, transforming what a critic once called his
“exuberantly overloaded prose.” He pares his chapters down to
pages, and his sentences to bone knives. Here, for example, is New
York City in the winter: “A woman kept snug by luxurious fur stood
uncomfortably with her arms folded while her Pomeranian shivered in
a drift.”
Though Nichols has revised his style, his
tremendous gifts remain unchanged: His ear for language, his
painter’s eye, his unsentimental compassion have never been better
employed. Nichols has reached the roots of a theme his work has
explored since the days of The Milagro Beanfield
War: “I am sorry for all the sorrows on this planet…,”
he writes. “Thank God we can still rejoice.”
The
Empanada Brotherhood John Nichols
208 pages,
hardcover: $22.95.
Chronicle Books, 2007.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Selling empanadas, building a community.
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