Book Review

Drift

Picador, 244 pp., $14 (paper)

Contemporary. Autobiographical. Self-conscious. Formative. Fiction. It promises two things: proliferation, apparently, until the very end of time; and a protagonist who moves. A young protagonist who starts out in darkness and ends up in light. That end, of course, is only the beginning. Writers like to write about growing up; what often results is nothing more than memoir with grad school devices plugged into the works (or, alternately, the chasms of inexperience). It's the familiar, the definite, the cinematic. The linear. The good ones are very good, and the bad ones are very bad. There's no sense in dropping or naming names here, since I'm sure we've all enjoyed and endured our fair share.

Manuel Luis Martinez will be at the Cepeda Branch Public Library, 651 N. Pleasant Valley, on Wednesday, June 4, at 7pm.

Manuel Luis Martinez's protagonist, Robert Lomos, is a bit different, and Martinez's first novel, Drift, is, too. Robert moves, all right -- from San Antonio to Los Angeles and back -- but his erratic path in the footprints of Martinez's expert narrative one is anything but linear. "I drive like my ass is on fire until I get to I-10," Robert narrates late after a disastrous reunion with his estranged mother and brother in Orange County, where he had hoped to "fix all this shit" by caring for them like the man his barnstorming, skirt-chasing musician father isn't. His mother, constantly cowering and zoned out on mood meds, and his "anomic" little brother, Antony, live with his aunt Naomi, part provider, part martyr, and all anti-Robert (and since the 16-year-old Sizzler bus boy has stashed Dexedrin, weed, and a revolver in her Mission Vieja home and will soon get his face bashed in after a rave just before buying a fenced 1985 Mustang, one hesitates to blame her). He is on his way back to San Antonio's Westside, where he lives with his grandmother.

It's going to take me straight through to S.A. A 1,200-mile shot, back the way I came. Here I am, a needle, pulling red thread again, but this time I don't want to look back. It's a mess again, no pattern, nothing that would make any sense. From the time I got off the bus at the L.A. terminal, I've left a confused trail, a path not even Sherlock Holmes could follow. If I could see the pattern, I'd see that it's a thick coil, its center my moms's house, such a confused mess of coil that it's no wonder I got tripped up in it.

Robert is forced to dizzily retrace his troubled life without a trace to go on. His only landmark is his Grams, not coincidentally Martinez's most well-drawn character besides his main, and when her health becomes questionable, Robert begins to question everything. He's a two-time loser, dropping out of public and Christian high schools, and fancies himself (somewhat randomly and very often disturbingly) as a vampire with "The Mask." He's working just above day labor in the summer scorch of San Antonio and finds himself at that frightening point where the sheer, frustratingly invisible weight of others' shaken faith in him has eroded his own. "Everyone I know is suffering something awful, some deep pulsating pain that has completely fucked up their ability to navigate through life," Robert tells us with an anger matched only by the intensity of Martinez's clipped, confident prose. "My moms is a wreck; me, I'm a lost son of a bitch; poor Antony, he'll probably wind up the same way as me. Now Grams? This is too much now. I want to tell God that I give up."

He doesn't, though. He's too smart to. What he finds, finally, amid the melancholy and bitter street comedy of Martinez's wise (at times a bit excessively so) -- and very good -- coming-of-age effort, is a chance. And what the reader finds is that he's happy to give him one.