Ann Patchett on Oscar Hijuelos’ Lush, Elegiac Novel Filled with Music and Intercourse ‹ Literary Hub

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love was first printed within the late summer time of 1989, once I was twenty-five. In these pre-internet days, my greatest pal Lucy was dwelling in Scotland, and we learn the novel collectively, writing letters forwards and backwards about Cesar and his brother Nester as in the event that they have been individuals we knew. We wrote in regards to the fluid music of Oscar Hijuelos’s prose, in addition to the precise music to which the novel had launched us. We have been obsessive about the concept life had a pinnacle, an ideal second to which, within the unknowable future, we’d sooner or later hearken again.

For the Mambo Kings, because the brothers have been recognized, the top got here when Desi Arnaz invited them onto I Love Lucy for a cameo. They’d fake to be Ricky Ricardo’s cousins visiting from Cuba. They wore white silk fits and sang their plaintive hit, “The Stunning Maria of My Soul.” Certainly this was the primary cease on what could be their meteoric rise, however because it turned out that silvery second was as excessive as they ever went, their fleeting minutes in historical past endlessly immortalized in reruns.

The excessive level of life for Cesar and Nestor was totally different from the excessive level of the band, and totally different one from the one other. For Nestor, his greatest days have been clear: the time he spent in Cuba because the lover of Maria, the passionate and exquisite girl who was totally with him after which, simply as totally, gone. Day by day that adopted her abrupt departure was one other torturous reminder of all he had misplaced. Even the twenty-two variations he wrote of the track “The Stunning Maria of My Soul” couldn’t overcome his melancholy. He met and married Delores, had two beloved kids, and nonetheless he was moody, distant. In Maria, Nestor had discovered all he ever wished, and when she was gone, the one factor he wished was the previous. Cesar, the older brother, balanced gentle to Nestor’s darkness. His devouring ardour for all times made no room to lament the abandonment of his nation, his mother and father, his spouse, daughter, or any variety of girls, as if the important thing to his pleasure was by no means wanting again.

The previous is the chorus to the Mambo Kings’ track of affection, the continuous loop on which the story spins. Nestor seems to be again to Maria, then Cesar seems to be again to Nestor. One imagines that even Desi Arnaz, who makes a reappearance on the finish as a kindly outdated man, longs for his earlier days. The novel tells us there have been at all times happier instances that had not been totally appreciated regardless of the continuous seizing of life, and people happier days fill the e book with longing: for Cuba earlier than Castro, for New York when mambo golf equipment dominated, for the men and women tricked out in all their finery as they took their place on the dance flooring.

Studying The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love once more greater than three many years later has pushed the worlds for which the Castillo brothers longed that a lot farther away, and added on layers that they might by no means have imagined. Not solely are the mambo golf equipment gone, however so is this sort of lush, elegiac novel that wanders freely with out a look after time. Studying it now, I’m struck by the disappearance of intercourse in literary fiction lately, as intercourse was the fixed obsession of the Mambo Kings, their leisure pastime and soulful pursuit. How had I so clearly remembered all their music and forgotten all their intercourse?

Oscar Hijuelos was many years youthful than Bellow and Updike and Roth, however he belonged to their age, and this novel belongs to that vanished period: the time when fictional characters and precise human beings rolled into mattress collectively continually, cheerfully, and with out remorse. Had this novel been written as we speak it could absolutely current questions—Have been the ladies pretty represented? Was there at all times consent?—however coming again as it’s, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love must be taken as yet one more layer of the previous. We’re at all times wanting again, and we are going to endlessly decide what got here earlier than by the lens of our newfound knowledge. The Castillo brothers are wanting again, and we’re wanting again at them, as many years from now others might be wanting again at us. Bless the novels that present accounts of the world that got here earlier than.

Not solely are the mambo golf equipment gone, however so is this sort of lush, elegiac novel that wanders freely with out a look after time.

Oscar Hijuelos died of a coronary heart assault at sixty-two. He was taking part in tennis. My pal Lucy died at thirty-nine. Of the various causes I like this e book, one is that Lucy and I had beloved it collectively. The friendship of a few twenty-five-year-olds, who puzzled if possibly we had already handed the very best second of our lives with out realizing it, is now layered onto these pages. However this can be a novel capable of bear no finish of wistfulness and loss, maybe for the very purpose that it’s mendacity on a mattress of intercourse and music, the appetites of unbridled pleasure, the very vibrancy of life everlasting.

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Excerpted from the e book The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love: A Novel by Oscar Hijuelos with a Foreword by Ann Patchett. Copyright © 1989 by Oscar Hijuelos. Foreword copyright © 2023 by Ann Patchett. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.