Review: Ordinary Gente Ordinary Lives

 Review: Dagoberto Gilb. New Testaments. San Francisco: City Lights, 2024. ISBN-10: 0872869318

Michael Sedano

I don’t remember how Winners on the Pass Line fell into my hands off the library shelf, but I know for sure the storytelling made me an “ever since then” follower of writer Dagoberto Gilb. Readers like me, who follow Gilb’s career, are happy to have a new—2024—collection of eleven stories, from venerable California publisher City Lights Books (link). I’m sure there are readers who have yet to discover Dagoberto Gilb’s work, making New Testaments their introduction to the writer’s imagination. Get ready for binge reading, gente!

Gilb's New Testaments imagination is an imagination tempered by age. The opening stories feature senior citizens and there are older characters surrounded by circumstances of age and memory throughout the collection.

The opening story “Gray Cloud On San Jacinto Plaza,” introduces a conversational narrator whose colloquial voice starts as a nine year old boy and by the last pages he’s an old man with the experiences and memories of a lifetime. His sister, his mother, his father are dead. He's happily married, his surviving sister comes to live with his family in Mexico city, where they live in prosperous class surroundings. 

Mexico is the setting for the second story, “Brindis at Covadonga.” A retiree from this side visits his artist-brother’s widow. He finds himself thrust into a challenging language environment. Dinner table conversation shares chronological and cultural perspective on Mexico City, including chatting about Mexica cannibalism. Gilb has readers floating in historical space when the story turns as particular as time and place get: an earthquake rumbles into his hotel room. 

Who are these people, these ordinary gente going through quotidian realities, things to be incorporated in a lifetime and lived past? There's a bit of code-switching, too.

Identity forms the heart of these stories, not in some chest-thumping “yo soy Chicano” testament, but with the understatement that defines ordinariness. That’s Gilb’s specialty-- ordinary people faced with everyday exigencies, neither great tragedy nor noble transcendence. Just gente.

The story, “Two Red Foxes” illustrates this with analytic distance and an empathetic eye. A man lives independently at the boundaries of imagination, memory, and dignity. He’s the story’s unreliable narrator and this is exactly what Gilb seeks from a reader’s few minutes inside the character’s tangled cognition and failing memory. The man remembers fragments of experience, and fashions a reality out of partially experienced events, like the title canines. He’s living in a kind of dream world and has cognitive resources sufficient to solve the problems his failing constitution creates.

Interestingly, the author isn’t painting a sympathetic portrait where he wants readers pulling for the old guy. There’s empathy for self-delusion but no commitment to the man’s survival. The author leaves the fellow on his own, scheming his way out of a memory conunundrum, surviving alone in that house, talking to the kids now and again.

“Prima” is the first story spoken in a younger voice, a twenty- or thirty- something male. He’s a self-described Chicano living comfortably with a companion. They hold entry-level jobs and make the rent by taking in a roommate. They’re comfortable but living on the edge of economic disaster. The story reminds readers that some of us are only one generation away from vastly altered circumstance.

Dagoberto Gilb brings these people and stories to light, then leaves the characters to their own fates and resolutions. The author doesn’t take sides and doesn’t expect readers to do so. Gilb isn’t judging these people but illustrating how things can be, how what happens happens, and how time keeps moving along, no bangs no whimpers.

“Nor all your piety nor wit can bring it back to cancel half a line.”