Dagoberto Gilb's "Uncle Rock"

The New Yorker still publishes fiction, but they don't include a monocle to help you read it anymore (they had to stop including monocles in 1943 when President Roosevelt ordered them rationed and sent as gifts to a grateful England to get their minds off of the nightly blitzkrieg raids, two years after he ordered all The New Yorker's free top-hats sent over there, too -- read your history book, everyone!). They publish fiction weekly from up-and-comers like E.L. Doctorow and Joyce Carol Oates, and they also posthumously publish everything Roberto Bolaño ever wrote while sitting on the toilet or passing notes in third grade arithmetic class (look for next week's issue, featuring a real post-modern gem of a story, copies of Bolaño's receipts for his favorite diner in Barcelona, including signature and tips -- 15%, usually!).

This week, though, they're running Dagoberto Gilb's short story, "Uncle Rock". I love Dagoberto Gilb. Sometimes I sit on my bed and look plaintively through the window at the trees outside -- cherry blossoms, all, and all with their flowers now bloomed and dropped and blown away into dust by the wind -- and wonder why Dagoberto Gilb isn't the most famous writer in America right now. I had never heard of him until I had the fortune of attending the wonderful Squaw Valley Writers Workshop in the summer of 2009, where he sat on panels and read some of his work. I, like most of his audience, was blown away and spent much of the remainder of the conference bothering him and running into him at the Reno airport on the way home to make sure he knew to get the restraining order filled out on the plane to save time. This semester, I taught some stories from his phenomenal Woodcuts of Women, and I'd like to think I've converted a sizable percentage of Washington, DC metro-area youth into burgeoning Gilbians.

"Uncle Rock" seems to me vintage Gilb -- an exploration of the cultural tensions felt by a young Chicano, told in conversational and diamond-sharp prose. Check him out describing the procession of men who flirt with our protagonist's, Erick, mother:

"Friendly, he’d put his thick hands on the table as if he were touching water, and squat low, so that he was at sitting level, as though he were being so polite, and he’d smile, with coffee-and-tobacco-stained teeth. He might wear a bolo tie and speak in a drawl. Or he might have a tan uniform on, a company logo on the back, an oval name patch on the front. Or he’d be in a nothing-special work shirt, white or striped, with a couple of pens clipped onto the left side pocket, tucked into a pair of jeans or chinos that were morning-clean still, with a pair of scuffed work boots that laced up higher than regular shoes."

As if he were touching water! Dagoberto Gilb should write all the stories. Gilb's able to hit the voice of an eleven year-old boy with perfect pitch; Erick, upset at this parade of strange men, "drove a fork into a goopy American egg yolk and bled it into his American potatoes." Here, in a disarmingly simple sentence, Gilb does so much: gives us a crystalline image of the yolk breaking; describes its "goop" just like Erick would to his friend Albert; and subtly interjects a dose of the racial and cultural tension that drips through the story -- American egg yolk, American potatoes. Later, we see Erick -- with his Anglo name -- shrug off attempts from his mother's suitors to speak to him in English, assuming (incorrectly) that his reticence comes from a language divide. Gilb never reaches too far with these instances of underlining Erick's unarticulated confusion about where he fits in between his Mexican mother and her Hispanic comers-on. Rather, he gives us a lonely, sweethearted kid, one we understand and believe in, whether we've even ever seen a man in a bolo tie or not. By the story's (surprising, to me) end, Gilb's made for us a convincing and full-blooded human in three short pages.

In any case, it's a welcome departure from New Yorker stories about post-Ivy Leaguers flitting around at parties and looking at each others' necklines. Now, since the magazine's taken a break from running stories like that, they can look over my story about post-Ivy Leaguers flitting around at parties and looking at each others' necklines, which has been at their desks for eight months. Fingers crossed!

--Corey