American Son A Novel by Brian Ascalon Roley – Save 29% Today!
Why Buy A American Son A Novel by Brian Ascalon Roley?
A powerful novel about ethnically fluid California, and the corrosive relationship between two Filipino brothers. Told with a hard-edged purity that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, American Son is the story of two Filipino brothers adrift in contemporary California. The older brother, Tomas, fashions himself into a Mexican gangster and breeds pricey attack dogs, which he trains in German and sells to Hollywood celebrities. The narrator is younger brother Gabe, who tries to avoid the tar pit of Tomass waywardness, yet moves ever closer to embracing it. Their mother, who moved to America to escape the caste system of Manila and is now divorced from their American father, struggles to keep her sons in line while working two dead-end jobs. When Gabe runs away, he brings shame and unforeseen consequences to the family. Full of the ache of being caught in a violent and alienating world, American Son is a debut novel that captures the underbelly of the modern immigrant experience.
Over 26 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!
Like Good Hemingway
Good read, and a quick one, but I think you should avoid reading it TOO quickly. The author’s style has been compared to Cormac McCarthy’s writing, but I agree more with an earlier reviewer here who wrote of this novel’s “Hemingwayesque power.”
Hemingway wrote with an “Iceberg Theory” in mind, meaning that something like making sure that 9/10 of the story was submerged out of sight. If the writer does this well, the reader can feel something like the grace and gravity of an iceberg because this untold part of the story is still evident somehow, still felt by the reader. It’s often an emotional weight, and BA Roley conveys that heaviness especially well here. A character in this novel comments of another, “sometimes the quiet ones have the more mysterious anxieties inside that are difficult for the rest of us to understand.” He’s commenting on someone other than the central character, but the portrayal of the protagonist here (Gabe) has that same tragic mystery about him. There’s a lot more going on with him than a quick reader might realize.
I was surprised by the ending, but I realized later that it’s the perfect way to end the book. So many good people are lost to the brutality around them.
American Son Review
When I started to read this book, I couldn’t put it down. I was so into the book I took every free moment to read. I finished the book in a few days. Great book.
Powerful – puts your imagination in overdrive
This novel is written in a narrative style in which for every sentence the narrator discloses, you suspect that he has ten more which he declines to tell you. In this way, American Son does indeed have that “Hemingway-like” quality in which so much is left unsaid that the reader forms opinions in their own minds to fill in the blanks. This technique of adding mystery is certainly intriguing, and makes for a haunting read.
The story is told in narration by Gabe, the younger of two half-Filipino, half-white (German-American) brothers. They live in Santa Monica, California, with their Filipino mother who works menial jobs to help support her two boys. Their German-American father left years ago after several incidents of domestic abuse which finally terminated when Tomas, who finally grew old enough and strong enough to physically overpower his father, kicked him out of the house.
The setting is from April 1993 through September 1993. Gabe is in high school, while his older brother, Tomas, is presumed to be approximately 19 or 20 years old.
Throughout the story, the complex relationship between Gabe, his brother Tomas, their relationship with their Filipino mother, and their whole family’s relationship with American society is explored, but with Gabe as the narrator, one gets the feeling that he wants to say very much more than he does, but that he just can’t express the feelings he has inside.
Each of the three parts of the story is prefaced by a letter from Gabe and Tomas’ uncle in the Philippines, who constantly exhorts his sister to send her wayward boys back to the Philippines to learn respect and discipline – however, also in the course of those letters is the very Filipino-like trait of one-upsmanship, in which the uncle proclaims all the success and happiness he and his family are experiencing, a very unsubtle rubbing-it-in which any Filipino reader would be familiar with. Gabe and Tomas’ mother is portrayed as a pitiable character – one who came to the USA seeking a better life for herself and her children, but completely naive to the ways of the real world, and thoroughly “colonialized” – a woman who allows herself to get stomped on and pushed around without so much as a squeak of complaint – but who later cries in shame and anger at herself for not speaking up. Gabe at times tries to shield her from this abuse, only to see his efforts unwelcome and unwanted by his mother, and at other times he is ashamed of his mother, who dark complexion and obvious foreign-ness is in stark contrast to the fashionable mothers of his classmates.
It is this colonialized attitude which leads to the climax of the story, an outpouring of misplaced righteous anger at being mistreated, and where the story abruptly ends.
For weeks after I finished this book, I kept thinking about the ending and the novel as a whole. Just an excellent book which I highly recommend.
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