The Gangster of Love
By Jessica Hagedorn
Houghton Mifflin, 311 pages, $22.95
`The Gangster of Love,” the raucous yet touching new novel by Jessica Hagedorn, begins when Rocky (nee Raquel) Rivera and her brother, Voltaire, are whisked from the Philippines to the United States by Milagros, their “deluded, beautiful mother,” who has finally decided to leave her wealthy and philandering husband. Milagros’ reckless escape brings with it predictable financial deprivation, and she struggles to survive in San Francisco by starting her own catering business, Lumpia X-Press, featuring her gloriously tasty lumpias–egg rolls, Filipino-style.
Food in these early chapters seems central to the Rivera family, which keeps meeting over the mother’s table–a battlefield where accusations and nourishment alike are served up. Before long, Milagros’ ferocious love frightens her children away. Increasingly beset by American dreams, they feel hemmed in by their mother’s Filipino codes of honor. Voltaire descends into serious depressions that take him from one institution to another, while Rocky takes up with guitarist Elvis Chang and travels first to L.A., then to New York. Soon enough, Manila, that “dazzling tropical city of memory,” with “all its taboos and obligations” seems far away to Rocky.
In a sense, “The Gangster of Love” can be seen as a companion volume to Hagedorn’s debut novel, “Dogeaters,” which was a 1990 National Book Award finalist. “Dogeaters,” exploring the violent drama of the Philippines’ recent history, was flavored with the wild and heady mix of that country’s popular culture. Though Hagedorn’s new novel takes place primarily in the United States, where political intrigue is replaced by performing arts scams and the hand-to-mouth hustle of New York’s downtown rock scene, it is similarly fueled by an ethnic patchwork and fluid identities, though here they are characteristically American.
“The Gangster of Love” is replete with characters who stalk city streets with invented names and invented personal histories. Having long seen herself as “ambitious, trapped in my media-saturated, wayward American skin,” Rocky invents herself into the “diva of Manila” with a self-important Patti Smith attitude. With her lover Elvis Chang, she fronts a postmodern soul band named The Gangster of Love that becomes for a time a makeshift, alternate family. The singer and lyricist for the group, Rocky becomes a lightning rod for the chaos of New York, where she is often “distracted by the whooping war cries and mystic babble of dealers on the street. Sonic frenzy, inspiration for more eerie songs.”
Though the narrative of “The Gangster of Love” is presented through multiple perspectives, Rocky’s viewpoint remains the most important, establishing the novel’s center of gravity. “Filipinos are endlessly grateful, but I’m supposed to be tough,” Rocky declares, and indeed her self-bestowed name is a craggy front for the soft Raquel inside.
Her uncle Marlon–a character actor living in L.A. whose career high point was a role in the movie “West Side Story”–understands this. She is his favorite niece, yet he ruefully observes that she has “so many walls up.” It’s not as easy for the reader to adopt Marlon’s patient view of his niece, for Rocky is sometimes too self-absorbed to completely engage the reader’s sympathy. Newly pregnant with her daughter, Venus, Rocky thinks nothing of downing two rounds of tequila while she tries to decide with the father whether or not to have the child. Yet she possesses her own brand of imperfect self-knowledge and no one, perhaps, could be more critical of Rocky than Rocky herself. Early on in her relationship with Chang, she is canny enough to understand that “he fulfilled my notion of love, which meant no one would ever get what they wanted.”
Rocky is most interesting when she lets down her walls, or at least when Hagedorn allows the reader to observe her character in a moment of contemplation. Just arrived in L.A., Rocky observes a lonely beach scene that echoes her own unacknowledged fears: a woman and her dog play catch with a piece of driftwood, and a single surfer “paddles farther and farther out, undaunted by the eerie calm of the ocean, waiting for waves that never come.”
Later in the novel, in her roach-filled New York apartment, Rocky can’t help spying on an “enchanted family” across the street: a middle-age woman who tends devotedly to a frail young man in a wheelchair. Rocky imagines he is waiting to die, imagines he is her distant brother, Voltaire, whom she has neglected for too long.
This novel, which began with a series of escapes from family, slowly turns back to its various points of origin. When her mother suffers a stroke, Rocky returns to San Francisco. Commuting from the intensive care ward to her mother’s empty apartment she feels the urge to re-examine her past; one of the most moving moments in the novel takes place when she interviews her Aunt Fely about family life in the Philippines during World War II.
Rocky, now a mother, eventually comes to terms with her own mother, whom she had long condemned as “a woman brave enough to abandon her marriage, but foolish enough to pine for the same man who betrayed her.” Impossible as Rocky’s mother can sometimes be, she is perhaps the most powerful character in the novel. Indeed, one of the high points of “The Gangster of Love” occurs when the old and failing woman, in New York to visit Rocky and granddaughter Venus, attends the trial of the glamorously shameless Imelda Marcos and struggles to follow the arcane legal maneuvers.
The book’s narrative offers competing strands of fate. Characters are shot in the street or institutionalized, fall ill with AIDS, die of messy old age, achieve unlikely fame, betray each other in love and business. Some, however, simply disappear from the narrative, as if Hagedorn had lost interest in them. Voltaire, Rocky’s brother, is particularly missed after the early chapters, while later in the novel Jake, “a Catholic rebel vet with a bulletproof vest” and the father of Rocky’s daughter, never quite becomes a real presence in the narrative.
Still, the novel ends on a touching and artful note. In the final chapter Hagedorn returns us to the Philippines, where the novel began, and shows us the household of Rocky’s cancer-ridden father and the people who are in the bittersweet throes of taking care of the dying man. Rocky is about to visit from America–the last sentence announces her arrival–and Hagedorn lets the reader see what Rocky is about to confront, lets the reader decide what Rocky will be able to appreciate and what she might very well miss.
While this sprawling novel doesn’t always have the sharpness and control of “Dogeaters,” it does have an edgy energy and an off-center street poetry that frequently disarms the reader. And in following Rocky Rivera’s circuitous American journey, “The Gangster of Love” is at its best when, in rejoining parents and child, it traces the connecting patterns in the crazy quilt of cultures that bind the Philippines and the United States.
