Book Blurbs

Hard Language
by Mike Padilla, '86
Arte Público Press,2000;
$12.95 (fiction).

Padilla's characters range from adolescent girls to middle-aged laborers to frail elderly women, and his scenes shift back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border. But a common thread runs through these short stories: everyone wants a better life, be it through a new career, home or relationship. More often they find disappointment and loss--but not without some form of enlightenment. A shop worker intent on mastering English and running his own business ruptures his marriage and alienates his best friend before he realizes that love is "the language more difficult to learn than any other." A schoolgirl cruelly belittles an unpopular classmate after defeating him in a race, only to be shamed when she discovers his hidden talents and humanity--and her own. The book, Padilla's first, won the UC-Irvine Chicano-Latino Literary Prize and a San Francisco Foundation award.

Short-Timers in Paradise
by John Wythe White, '66
Anoai Press, 2000;
$14.95 (fiction/essays).

Born in New York City, White discovered surfing as a teenager in Southern California, and he admits that most of his important decisions--university, career (freelance writer) and permanent abode (Hawaii)--revolved around that pursuit. This eclectic collection of short stories, essays and a play explores how newcomers past and present confront life in the islands. White's real and imagined personalities include an 18th-century English sailor, an itinerant band of Bay Area musicians and a young woman obsessed with a mango tree. But his recurring theme is the art, science and mystery of surfing, which he likens to certain Eastern philosophies: "a moondance, a meditation, a nonlinear reality. At the end of the journey you're back where you started. The only thing changed is you."

Interrogations at Noon
by Dana Gioia, '73, MBA '77
Graywolf Press, 2001;
$14 (poetry).

Gioia is alternately provocative, sardonic and wistful as he contemplates Hades ("Dying is bitter, but eternity/Confined in this black place is worse"); the revenge of Juno ("Why not choose earth when heaven is a whorehouse?"); or failed relationships ("There are so many might-have-beens,/ What-ifs that won't stay buried,/ Other cities, other jobs,/ Strangers we might have married"). And at times, he's outright funny, as in "Alley Cat Love Song": "Come into the garden, Fred,/For the neighborhood tabby is gone./Come into the garden, Fred./I have nothing but my flea collar on. . . ." Although Gioia laments the inadequacy of language--"words are never as precise as touch"--his poetry demonstrates its power.

Baby's Breath
by Lynne Hugo and Anna Tuttle Villegas, '74
Synergistic Press, 2000;
$24.95 (fiction).

Leah Pacey is an ordinary mom, a middle-class artist dealing with her bright but emotionally difficult daughter, Alyssa. Baby's Breath spends a full hundred pages examining their fragile relationship before dropping its bombshell. Leah flies to Berkeley when Alyssa--a Cal student--disappears, and police break the news that her daughter has given birth to and abandoned an infant in a public restroom. The authors avoid plot-driven melodrama as they delve into the psyches of a mother, struggling to understand and protect her child, and a daughter, haunted and lost. Baby's Breath draws the reader in, not with its story line but with the emotional depths it plumbs.