The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb

3 1 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 8 ber of retirees and children who now live in Las Vegas, more pressure is placed on what Rothman terms “the sandwich generation.” This generation carries much of the weight for the very young and the very old. When more people contribute to their community, that community becomes stronger. If people sit back apathetically and expect the tourists and those who serve them to take care of them, then the feeling of community, and ultimately the community itself, atrophies. Perhaps, then, it is not coincidental that of the four sections of essays in the book, the “Las Vegas as Community” section is the shortest. Still, Playing the Odds is optimistic about Las Vegas and its future. Rothman makes it clear that the issues the city faces are the result of its amazing success and that ultimately the city’s biggest challenge is dealing well with it, some­ thing that is often as difficult to do as becoming successful in the first place. He emphasizes the strength of Las Vegas: the city’s ability to make its guests feel special. Nobody does that as well as Vegas. The tourists who come here this year and get what they want will be back next year to get what they want again, even though what they want may be different both times. The Flowers. By Dagoberto Gilb. New York: Grove Press, 2008. 250 pages, $24.00. Reviewed by Frank Bergon Vassar College, New York Beginning fifteen years ago with the appearance of a collection of stories, The Magic of Blood (1993), followed by a novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna (1994), another story collection, Woodcuts of Women (2002), a collection of essays, Gritos (2003), and now a new novel, The Flowers (2008), Dagoberto Gilb has emerged as a major chronicler of the new urban West. Bom in California and currently living in Texas, Gilb ranges from El Paso and Albuquerque to Las Vegas and Los Angeles to draw from his Mexican American heritage and working-class experience (for sixteen years, he worked on construction sites, mostly with understandable pride as a union high-rise carpenter) to fashion one of the most impressive displays of various western voices in contemporary literature. Gilb is a master of voice, as anyone knows who has heard him on NPR or at his vibrant public readings. The title of his new novel, The Flowers, refers to a Los Angeles apart­ ment building misnamed Los Flores (it should be Las Flores because flower is feminine in Spanish). Fifteen-year-old Sonny Bravo lives in apartment #1 with his Mexican mother, who aspires to be sexily American, and his new stepdad, the building’s owner and misnamer, who describes himself as descended from Scottish and French Canadian mountain men. “I’m an Okie child of the dust bowl otherwise,” he says. “Means my family came here because there was no place else” (31). He brags to a friend, “I even got myself married to a pretty little Mexican gal,” as did the former cop and construction worker in #1, whose B o o k r e v ie w s 3 1 9 bigotry explodes when he learns that the apparent albino right next to him in #6 with “wavy, kinky, peroxided” hair, a street hustler of used cars to blacks, is “white but he’s really black” and has taken in a black roommate (51, 136, 195). No one is quite as they seem in this world, where the filtered illumination through a teenager’s limited perceptions and emotions is like having a rheostat gradually turned up in a dim room. We eventually infer that the foreigner in #5 with the strange name Josep is actually Catalan. “Everybody’s from somewhere else,” a character says (185). Not quite everyone, though. Gilb creates a pair of endearing, hilarious characters, Mexican American twins, full of physical, emotional, and sexual energy as well as linguistic inventiveness in their code switching and Spanglish. “Is too mush, Tanto,” one...

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