POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW:

1. First of all: the sheer chutzpah, to write a comedy about Guantanamo. But comedy it is: Boyet (Boy) Hernandez, just-off-the-jet fashion designer from the Philippines and armed with a degree from the Fashion Institute of Makati; landing wide-eyed and hungry in New York to get the "dollar dollar bill y'all;" roaming through an underworld filled with exotic models, Williamsburg hipsters, and bad performance art; then, in a narrative shift worthy of a comedy of (t)errors, arrested and spirited away to Guantanamo as a "fashion terrorist." A comedy set in Guantanamo is too soon, one might say, but as the detention camp just celebrated its tenth birthday, one may argue that remembering it is not soon enough.

But is it funny? Oh yes, often hilariously, but sometimes, smugly so. (More about this later.) The novel is, at its core, a stinging sendup of the fashion industry (though all I know of Fashion Week, on which Boy's labors are focused, is when the inevitable profiles of designers appear in The New Yorker: its apparent shallowness, the skipping-song rhythm of the names of its Eastern European denizens ("Olya and Dasha, Irina, Karina, Marijka, Kasha, Masha"), couture's pretense to (political) relevance. (One of Boy's runway creations, a transparent burka -- worn by a model clad only in pasties and a thong, no less -- is described by Boy as "exploring our collective fears about Islam.")

But there's empathy, too, and perhaps even admiration, for the vision, and for the hustle, and one detects, in Gilvarry's vivid and detailed prose, a more affectionate undercurrent. (The novel is also, in many ways, a love letter to New York City and its boroughs -- well, some of them.)


2. One of the interesting things about the novel is how it dispenses, in a sense, with the cliches those on the outside "know" as prison life: no cafeteria scenes, no trading for cigarettes, no escape. Since Boy is guarded 24/7, there is hardly any interaction with other prisoners (they're disembodied voices, almost), and so interminable stretches of time are necessarily spent with only a guard or an interrogator, or the spectral designers, ex-girlfriends, and social climbers that haunt his memoir. Gilvarry simply sits back here and makes the reader wonder whose company is worse.


3. So it isn't like a Solzhenitsyn novel by any means, but in this "memoir" Gilvarry has a deft way of tightening the noose around Boy (and the reader), so to speak. The laughs are broad, and come easy, sometimes too easy, at the start. When we discover that Boy has hired a publicist named Ben Laden (changed by his Irish grandfather from McLaden, who was tired of being called Mac), we know exactly where it's going.

Even the privations of Boy's isolation in Guantanamo have a mock-despairing quality to them; it helps a lot, too, that Gilvarry has written Boy's character as not particularly likable, and callous about his quest for capital. One of Boy's first actions upon arrival at the prison is to cut off the sleeves from his orange jumpsuit, which he later refers to as his "sleeveless top." ("Never before in my life have I had to wear the same thing every day," he complains.) But slowly, the grimness increases, until the reader is forced to reassess the humor of the beginning.


4. Yes, the narrative twists are artificial, but surely no more so than the legal contrivances of military lawyers who argued for the constitutionality of extraordinary rendition and the suspension of habeas corpus, among others. The absurdities of Bryant Park fall away, to be replaced with the even greater lunacy that is Guantanamo.


5. SPOILERS FOLLOW:

I was chatting on Twitter with someone who thought the ending -- I had in mind the 25-page afterword, written by Gil Johannessen -- was an abrupt shift in tone. (It's a rude and sudden shift in perspective too.) But it's significant that the memoir ends once pen and paper are taken away from Boy; the absence that we experience is Boy's voice, literally, taken away from him, and the reader.

Someone else has to speak for Boy at this point; the body, under torture, cannot speak except for its scars. Boy's inevitable torture is left only to the imagination; we may casually toss around adjectives like "unimaginable," but it's precisely that gap in the narrative that serves to highlight the work of imagining for which the reader is responsible.


6. I'm not sure I like how those footnotes function, though. Some are corrections to quote attribution, some are additions of detail, but some just seem plain smug. (I won't ruin a particularly funny footnote regarding Dostoevsky though.) But this has the effect of undercutting Boy's voice, its perceived veracity being the raison d'etre of the memoir. Indeed -- and this perception is enhanced by the fact that "Gil Johannessen" and Alex Gilvarry share a syllable -- these footnotes seem to be the explicit moments where the protagonist is being ridiculed, if gently. The fact that they mostly serve to point out mistakes in Boy's cultural literacy don't always seem very fair.


7. I met Alex Gilvarry at a book reading he gave in San Francisco last month. Upon hearing that I was born and raised in the Philippines, he said he'd be curious to know what I thought of the novel, given that perspective. Obviously I enjoyed the book, as you can see above, but I'm not still quite sure what he meant.

On my blog and elsewhere I generally take pains to use words like "authenticity" and "accuracy" as concepts to be analyzed, not as criteria or values to be assessed, and so the portrayal of Gilvarry's imagined Philippines is his own. But there's a sense in which Boy's Filipinoness is, in an odd way, merely part of the window dressing, pun intended; it's not really necessary to the plot. Boy's instant assimilation and cultural cosmopolitanism, despite all the misquotes, brands him as one of those semi-mythic elite, globe-trotting sophisticates, ignorant of terrestrial sovereignties, unbothered by petty nationalisms, and whose allegiances lie more along class lines and the capacity to consume. But Boy seems, at least as far as his character is willing to reveal, of squarely middle-class background in the Philippines.

I also find it somewhat hard to believe that Boy, in his six-by-eight-foot cell, wouldn't entertain memories of his homeland, which hardly figures in his reminiscences at all; when he closes his eyes and thinks of his "former life," it's a "fall fashion week in New York City" instead. But I guess that's the kind of man Boy is.

[Also crossposted on my blog, The Wily Filipino.] ( )

Boy Hernandez is a starry-eyed young fashion designer from Manila who heads to New York determined to make it big in the fashion world. During his early struggles he is befriended by his neighbour Ahmed Qureshi. Ahmed loves Boy's suits and agrees to invest in his nascent label. He introduces him to publicist Ben Laden, and Boy is off and running.

With this springboard, Boy is soon the toast of Fashion Week. Profiled in the best magazines as a major up-and-coming young designer, and a consort with models and the glitterati. Yet as soon as his star flares, he finds himself whisked away to Guantanamo and maligned as the Fashion Terrorist. How could a young man so in love with the American dream find himself locked away in No Man's Land?

This is a diverting enough book, funny in places, but pretty predictable. If you are going to write a satire about Guantanamo during the Bush years, I think it needs to be more trenchant and biting than this offering. ( )

Don't let the title fool you, this is indeed fiction, but it is written as a memoir, expertly blending the story of both Boy's rise to fame and his time as a prisoner. ( )

Alex Gilvarry has written an absolutely brilliant and entertaining novel. The premise is so outlandish – he combines a humorous satirical look at the fashion industry with eye-opening insights into the way “detainees” are treated at Guantanamo Prison. It doesn’t seem possible that these two storylines could be joined together in an interesting and compelling way, but Gilvarry does it. The book is written as the confession of Boy Hernandez, a Filipino immigrant with dreams of becoming a world famous designer. For most of the book, we learn of Boy’s journey from a Manila fashion school, where he was the second best student to a rival who hit the big time fast, to the streets of New York, where he arrives nearly penniless but dreams of the day when he’ll be able to showcase his own designs during Fashion Week at Bryant Park. When he stumbles upon a neighbor who offers to bankroll his ambitions, he willfully keeps a blind eye to that man’s shady business dealings. When his new partner, Ahmed, turns out to be an arms dealer, Boy, gets caught up in the post 911 paranoia and ends up in Guantanamo and has to write this confession to try to prove his innocence. Gilvarry’s portrayal of a designer’s mind – the way he looks at clothes, the way he brainstorms new ideas, and all the connections he has to leverage to make inroads into the business are fascinatingly portrayed. You learn a lot about how clothing designers think and develop their ideas. And Boy’s voice is so wonderfully unique. He has a humorously fragile ego – with all of his petty jealousies with his rivals are right at the forefront – but then he turns into a powerful voice of innocent victims as he describes the brutal and unforgiving ways that prisoners are treated by the government when fear provides them with the justifications to ignore the guidelines for humane treatment set forth by the Constitution and Geneva Convention. This book is so unique and so entertaining, I highly recommend it. ( )

This is a bit out of my normal range of reading. This is not just because I have been reading so much YA literature, but also because I generally try to avoid anything political. However, when I got an offer to review this book, I took it, since who doesn't love a free book. Besides, it's always (note: this is hyperbole) good to push your boundaries and leave your comfort zone. I am so glad I did.

From the first, I loved this book. Boy has such a clear strong voice and a wonderful sense of humor, despite the darkness of many sections of the story. The bulk of the book is his confession to his interrogators, alternating between his current thoughts at the time and his memories of events in roughly chronological order. There are also humorous footnotes here and there that contain a fashion magazine writer's notes on what Boy got wrong in his statement.

From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is like Ugly Betty meets Little Brother. What makes everything in this book so painful, and not just because you're laughing so hard at the dark humor, is that it is believable. I can totally imagine our government mistakenly ruining an innocent man's life and never owning up to their errors.

This is a most excellent read that I recommend highly to those who fear our country may be turning into a dystopia, who love black comedy, or adore high fashion. ( )