Maceo Montoya

PREPARATORY NOTES FOR FUTURE MASTERPIECES. Strange title, strange book - but a pretty compelling story nevertheless. I don't even know how to 'categorize' this episodic, picaresque novel. A little bit of Holden Caulfield, a little bit of LITTLE BIG MAN. But an awful lot more of its author, Maceo Montoya, I suspect, who is a professor of Chicanx Lit at UC Davis. I know very little about that niche genre, but this novel will probably - eventually - hold a prominent place in it. I'm kinda stuck on what exactly to say about this book. I thought it started off a bit slowly, but then gathered momentum as it progressed. And the "note" that accompanies it gives you a small hint that it could be a kind of Chicano Forest Gump. And I suppose it would be if readers recognized the "historical" characters that our unnamed narrator encounters along his journeys. And they are real people, important in the Chicano movement(?), I guess. The one that interested me the most was the last, a writer named Oscar Zeta Acosta, who is famous for his book, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BROWN BUFFALO, and for his mysterious disappearance in Mexico. The book sounds kinda intriguing, I must admit, even though I don't think I've ever heard of it. But here's the story at hand, the PREP NOTES one: it begins when the nameless narrator is just a boy in small town New Mexico who wants desperately to be an artist, like the French artist, Courbet, whom he idolizes. His father dies, leaving him and his mother penniless. He is 18 in 1943, but avoids being drafted because he is epileptic. He also has an aversion to real work, preferring to concentrate on his "art." But he doesn't really create any visual art. He doesn't draw, he doesn't paint. He just writes detailed, beautiful notes about what he is GOING to draw or paint. So his widowed mother (who has a baby too), kinda kicks him out. He meets another young man, Enrique, very effeminate, who obviously has a real crush on our hero, although there's no indication of a same-sex relationship. After some short-lived misadventures in Los Angeles, they go to Albuquerque where his new friend takes on three jobs to support the two of them. This goes on for about five years. His mother remarries and her new husband sets up our narrator in a small studio out in the sticks, where he meets Ella, a beautiful dwarf. (No, really - a dwarf!) A brief, passionate affair ensues, during which our hero actually does a series of drawings of Ella. She leaves him. He goes off with an itinerant preacher - another 'famous' Chicano figure, Reies Lopez Tijerina - who finally dumps him. He ends up in an insane asylum in California, where he meets a so-called famous artist, Martin Ramirez. He stays locked up for more than twenty years, creates nothing. Is finally released to live with his again-widowed mother, meets Oscar Acosta, goes off with him on a crazy, alcohol-and-pills-fueled road trip through Texas & Mexico. Finally ends up in a nursing home where he spends his final days madly typing up the story of his life and leaving a stack of crude drawings to go with the manuscript, all of which is inherited by his nephew, who gets it all to a noted Chicanx culture expert, Professor Pizzaro, who has published this book - with notes & commentary. (Whew!) It's a crazy, zig-zag kinda narrative, but it's pretty darned interesting. I stayed up until almost 1AM last night just to finish it. Montoya tells a good story. And he also did all the black-and-white drawings that are scattered through the book. I looked him up. His father was an artist. He had a brother who was a noted poet. And he is an artist AND a writer. I may have to read something else this guy wrote. I know this is an awful, awkward "book review," but I really enjoyed this book. Very highly recommended. (four and a half, no, four and three-quarter stars).

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (más)