Empress of the Splendid Season by Oscar Hijuelos

I think the title of this book is rather, well, splendid, and the subject matter is potentially engaging. The heroine is an immigrant to New York City. Growing up as a pampered socialite, Lydia is the mayor's daughter in a small town in pre-Castro Cuba. A sexual indiscretion on her part causes her to be sent packing by a stern and demanding father. In exile, she travels to New York, where she eventually settles into life as wife, mother and cleaning lady to the city's well-to-do. We know Lydia as a young woman being courted by the serious waiter Raul in the 1940s; we witness her two children as they negotiate their first-generationhood in the 1960s; we watch her gentle husband Raul slip into ill-health and heavy drinking. We also get episodes from her life as a cleaning woman - a window into a variety of lives. We read as the neighbourhood changes, as do the lives of her friends. And we are still reading as the whole family settles into adulthood; finally with a bit of money and security. So why don't I really care? I kept telling myself this stuff should be interesting and yet I was so distant from the material. I decided to blame the writing style.

So let me first say that this is the second book I've read by Oscar Hijuelos. The first one was The Fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez, also an epic-style family narrative, that was engaging and enjoyable. There was more loving detail put into the characterization and lots more family members to tell interesting stories about. Hijuelos tends to write in an objective reporting style, but then the point should come across in the details, the dialogue, extraordinary circumstances. For instance, there is no vibe when the narrator keeps reminding us that Lydia is concerned about keeping her values even though she is poor... nor any spark behind the bald reports of each characters' existential moments where they look around and ask if that's all there is. It's as if these people aren't even interesting the author that much. Here's an example of what I mean:

"If it was her destiny to have Raul as a husband, she could at least take comfort in the way her children had turned out. Even if they resided at great emotional distances from their parents, no great tragedies had befallen them. While Rico made his way through school, Alicia had not only weathered the difficulties of her youth, but had found herself a nice husband - a building contractor - whom she met while attending a jobs conference in upstate New York in 1973. Once the confusions of youth had abated, after a directionless tenure, she had gone to live in Troy, New York, where she worked in a health food store and shared a house with other young people her own age; she had never really returned home, except sporadically, for she did love her mother and father, but she had been determined to strike out for herself."

Is it just me, or can you hear a distant "yada yada yada" while reading this? Would uneducated Lydia really think in terms of "great emotional distances"? And isn't there something wrong if the author has to tell us in this manner that Alicia loves her parents? I feel like I'm reading a memo or something.

Though to be fair, the book is not entirely uninteresting. I could have picked some better excerpts. Like the episode where Lydia cleans house for a satanist, or when Rico has to spell psychology over the phone to his mother. But in general this book is missing a certain liveliness... authenticity... conviction.

Buy Empress of the Splendid Season from amazon.com or amazon.ca.but you'd do better to buy The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez fromamazon.com or amazon.ca.

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