The Madonnas of Echo Park: A Novel

This book is all about identity. It relates the stories of several Mexican immigrants and its second generation as they try to live the American Dream around the Echo Park area in the city of Los Angeles. As with other ethnic groups within Los Angeles, they see themselves as Americans but also set apart from others by their Mexican background and culture. Holding on to their Mexican heritage, integration between ethnic groups is a slow and hesitant process that continues to be a struggle even for the second generation, often accompanied by feelings of a loss of identity and belonging.Another recurring theme within this patchwork of stories is the lack of family cohesion. Children grow up without their fathers, often even unaware of who their father is. Mothers are forced to abandon children in an effort to escape the poverty trap. Instead of a family, the community takes on the role of parents, which explains in part the close knit structure of these communities. As prosperity also reaches these immigrants and the face of the neighbourhood changes, their communities change too, perhaps not into the American Dream as once hoped for, but into something that is American nonetheless.While all this takes place in the background we meet an older Mexican going through the daily humiliation trying to find a day’s work waiting to be picked out in a carpark. We meet his wife and his daughter as they all drift apart and struggle with their own financial troubles and relationships. We meet their friends, their lives mingle and touch but never quite seem to overlap, just like a patchwork quilt. Their choices both exasperate and touch but always evolve around the area of Echo Park. It’s like the bigger the country, the less people will travel.Each of these people get their own voice within the book. They tell their own story and we get different accounts of shared experiences. This is what gives the book its cohesion and warmth. Their voices ring true and they sketch a warm, vivid and sometimes ugly picture of what it is to live as an (il)legal Mexican in Los Angeles, both decades ago and in the present day. As with some sketches, it leaves vague edges and some of the characters blend together but what remains is a strong tale of people who try to find a balance between holding onto their heritage and finding their own place within the melting pot of American society.

I have officially read a rejuvenated John Updike in The Madonnas of Echo Park. I’ve long followed such fluency throughout my life and career, and now it protrudes its head again in an ethnically-bound novel. Though the book is divided in eight compartments (plus the pulse of the story which is “Author’s Note")—or maybe they’re apartments where the windows are jacaranda blossom-colored through the eyes of the deeply smitten reader—the links between them are expressively cool, subtle. The language is erudite, eclectic prose; mainstream to those who passionately crave such poetry.There is milieu in Echo Park, California. Its portrayed residents—a homely housekeeper, her outgoing daughter, Aurora, a father struggling to make ends meet while avoiding deportation, and other teenaged girls who seem to mark places up the range of Americanization—are cornered in familiar situations that put a strain on a standard culture. One can ticket a drive-by shooting as far worse than choosing who to kick out from a bus to avoid mob upheaval. But that choice still depends on majority, not on right and wrong. Message to the human condition is flung when the bus driver gets off and meets a hypersensitive allegiance to race anyway. This is existentialism in Echo Park, one that cannot be escaped even through stained glass.I have my own ordeal in labeling characters; I do not. The author here is more of a realist and do. It is perhaps pragmatic for him to describe because this is where he grew up and how. Deal with it and confront the imperfection with the musical flow of his narrative. Yes, and that Madonna reference, that could only be hoisted from that once ever-changing image of her, from what is stagnant in Echo Park—the struggles and pains of a variegated group still trying to avoid the label “displaced.”I’ve read a lot of Updike. It’s good to see him revived and take up the penname of Brando Skyhorse.(Yet, Mr. Skyhorse, you don't have to "slip into" this remarkable new voice for it is your very own.)

I really enjoyed reading this book and getting wrapped up in the small world of Echo Park. It was fascinating to see how Skyhorse made connections between characters and how they were all somehow connected. There were a couple characters that I thought felt a little forced that I did not feel myself as engaged with or didn't think were necessary to the novel, but the majority of the characters were thought out and complex. In fact, I would sometimes become so attached to a particular character that I was sad when their chapter was over and wished they had an entire novel to themselves. I particularly enjoyed the way the novel would force me to reconsider my own judgements against a character after reading different perspectives of what happened and being able to intimately get to know somebody who not thirty pages before felt like the enemy. Even more interesting to me, sometimes I would come to sympathize with a character and then truly see the consequences of their actions and how others were affected, and think worse of them. Some may not like the way that the book suddenly shifts in perspectives and time, and I was occasionally confused, but I think it adds to the almost mythical feel to the book and allows for the changes in your own opinions of the characters I mentioned earlier. It also helps you see how the area itself changes over time. This is definitely the kind of novel that you're sad to leave after becoming enveloped its world, and I know I'll probably enjoy the book even more after a second (and third, and fourth) reading.

Took a bit of getting into as there are different stories that eventually all tie in together . It is a quick insight into how the Mexican people were treated in LA, many if whom lived there before the Mexican /American war.