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No Matter How Much You Promise . . .: A Symphonic Novel, by Edgardo Vega Yunqué
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An epic novel of jazz, race and the effects of war on an American family
This sweeping drama of intimately connected families --black, white, and Latino-- boldly conjures up the ever-shifting cultural mosaic that is America. At its heart is Vidamía Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who sets out in search of the father she has never known. Her journey takes her from her affluent home to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where her father Billy Farrell now lives with his second family. Once a gifted jazz pianist, Billy lost two fingers in the Vietnam War and has since shut himself off from jazz.
In this powerful modern odyssey, Vidamía struggles to bring her father back to the world of jazz. Her quest gives her a new understanding of family, particularly through her half-sisters Fawn, a lonely young poet plagued with a secret, and Cookie, a sassy, streetsmart homegirl who happens to be "white." And when Vidamía becomes involved with a young African-American jazz saxophonist, she is forced to explore her own complex roots, along with the dizzying contradictions of race etched in the American psyche.
Edgardo Vega Yunqué vividly captures the myriad voices of our American idiom like a virtuoso spinning out a series of expanding riffs, by turns lyrical, deadly, flippant, witty, and haunting.
- Sales Rank: #3286991 in Books
- Published on: 2003-10-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.95" h x 6.30" w x 9.30" l, 1.10 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 656 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Yunque's sprawling, old-fashioned debut, a multigenerational melting-pot epic set in New York City in the 1980s, is populated by a host of characters with patchwork identities: white, Puerto Rican, black, rich, poor. At the center of the tangled web is Puerto Rican-Irish Vidamia Farrell, daughter of upwardly mobile Elsa Santiago and Vietnam War vet Billy Farrell. Vidamia meets her father for the first time when she is 12 and discovers that she has two families: she lives with her strict mother and CPA stepfather in an affluent New York suburb, but she is powerfully drawn to her father's bohemian household on Manhattan's rough Lower East Side. Her father is a former jazz pianist whose career was cut short by the war, which cost him two fingers and his sanity. Vidamia is fascinated by his story and becomes fast friends with her stepsister Cookie, a dazzlingly blonde homegirl; when she is almost 17, she falls in love with Wyndell Ross, a black saxophonist. A multitude of secondary characters are fully developed: Elsa, Vidamia's mother, who struggles to leave the barrio behind; Fawn, Cookie's doomed poet sister; Maud, Billy's bar-owning Irish mother. The author's storytelling is unapologetically sentimental and rambling; his loving depiction of New York's Puerto Rican subculture reflects the full spectrum of city life. A brutal rape and a violent act of retaliation bring the novel to a sobering close, but Yunqu‚ (The Comeback, etc.) leaves his readers with a sense of hope and hard-won harmony.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Like its oversize title, this is the kind of novel that refuses to leave anything out. Vega Yunque seems determined to take D. H. Lawrence at his word and produce the "bright book of life," the whole messy sprawl of living and dying. He fails, of course, but in failing, he produces an almost hypnotically readable novel--about jazz, about race, about coming-of-age, and above all, about New York. The central character is Vidamia Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who starts the book by looking for her father, then tries to save him, and along the way, attempts to understand all there is to understand about love, music, and racism. A tall order for a teenager, even an absurdly precocious one, so it's no surprise she needs a little help. Vega Yunque gives it to her in the form of a plethora of other characters and stories, stretching from Manhattan's East Village to Puerto Rico and the Appalachians and encompassing cameos from Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Darwin. The heart of the story, though, is Vidamia and her Irish father, Billy, piano prodigy and Vietnam vet, tortured by memories of the war and the wound that cost him his jazz career. When Vega Yunque isn't climbing on his own soapbox to declaim, Thackeray-like, on the virtues and shortcomings of his characters, he's propping those same characters up on their own soapboxes. But just as one's tolerance for such overweening verbiage grows thin, along comes a moment of such honest, wrenching emotion, free of all artifice, that we shrug our shoulders and plow on. Vega Yunque is an infuriating, utterly undisciplined writer, but he may just be the Thomas Wolfe of the multicultural twenty-first century. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Ed Vega . . . has appropriated English, making it imitate Spanish, jazz and street noise. He creates a fantasy community out of the materials of exile."
--The Village Voice
"In a prose that flows like life itself and makes reading an act as natural as singing or crying, Vega Yunqué amalgamates all --accents, skin colors, longings, obsessions, reciprocal mistrust, possibilities of connection, questions of identity. Situating his theme beyond racism, but also beyond its frigid, facile opposite, "political correctness," the author guides us solely by his finely tuned sense of what it is to be human. ‘Let the song sing you, honey’, one character says to another, giving us the key: Let the book read you. With this magnificent novel, that’s all you have to do."
--Laura Restrepo, author of Leopard in the Sun and The Dark Bride
"The 'perpetual war' we find ourselves in—from Sand Creek and the Civil War to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and the streets of New York City—is met head-on here with such unfashionable means as narrative, character, and emotion. Going in turns bitter and sweet against the grain of so much made-to-order fiction, Edgardo Vega Yunqué’s intricate and informed generosity of vision begins to render something like justice to our truncated, abbreviated, and categorized selves."
--Ammiel Alcalay, author of Memories of Our Future and After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture
"Masterfully crafted and complex, this coming of age tale of Vidamia Farrell is irresistible. Puerto Rican culture and its tangential connections to all that is Black and some that is White aims at the vortex of race in America. The many histories of our people are evoked by our music and sing like sinews of the body and leave the reader a bittersweet experience that rivals the strength of our own memories. I couldn't put it down and was saddened to leave the plethora of vital, cruel, loving, and questioning characters who I now feel as part of me. Absolutely amazing."
--Ntozake Shange, author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf
"Not long ago we would hail Vidamia and her family as a contradiction. Today it dawns on us that it's the incumbent social construction of race, plaster falling like rain, that contradicts itself. I've tried to move minds to the light of this new day; Edgardo Vega Yunqué will move reader's hearts."
--Leon Wynter, author of American Skin
"Big, brave, boisterous and brawling, Edgardo Vega Yunqué comes out swinging from the first sentence and leaves us, by the end, in a perfect heap. What a title, what a family, what a sense of the city: this novel is a mythic embodiment of our times and a wonderful inventory of New York's human music."
--Colum McCann, author of This Side of Brightness and Dancer
"Edgardo Vega Yunqué has written one from the heart, a vivid, poignant book about love, loss, and family."
--Kevin Baker, author of Sometimes You See It Coming and Paradise Alley
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
An amazing symphony - if you can brave it!
By Kate C.
If you want to see the world from a different perspective, pick up this book and delve in today. I must admit the story is filled with such sadness and horror that I had difficulty making it to the ending, but as I had hoped the conclusion was filled with optimism and hope for the characters' futures.
The story follows the journey of a young girl named Vidamía Farrell, who is half Puerto Rican and half Irish, as she meets a father she has never known and discovers a family and identity she was completely unaware existed. Through her interaction with a number of characters with different backgrounds, and her interest in her own family lineage, Vidamía discovers a world view full of suffering and confusion, but one that is too real to deny. Another important character to the story is her father, Billy Farrell, who is physically and emotionally scarred from his experiences in Vietnam and the loss of his friend Joey Santiago. Billy struggles with his memories and guilt from the war and his inability to play jazz music as he once did.
In his novel, Edgardo Vega Yunqué jumps from one character to another through effortless connections, allowing the reader to see the thoughts of many different characters and hear their tales. These experiences shift from past to present and back again, creating a complete image of each person and all they have been through to make them who they are. Although these jumps tend to make the book seem scattered and at times confusing, the overall effect for the reader is worth the brief moments of confusion. Woven throughout the story is the theme of jazz music, which is used to express the sorrow of characters, to tell their stories, and help them recover from the traumas of the past. While I have never listened to a great deal of jazz music, the references to jazz in this book showed me the power of emotion that can be expressed through this channel and the struggles of the jazz musician.
After reflecting for several days and letting the scenes and characters settle in my mind, I realized that Yunqué had taken me on an amazing journey that dashed back and forth among characters, backwards and forwards in time, and from one perspective to another throughout the six hundred pages, ultimately teaching me a lesson in culture, diversity, and the suffering that none of us can escape in this life. Perhaps if the scenes had not been as powerful, this novel would not have moved me as it did and I now know the power contained within these pages will remain with me for a lifetime.
While I struggled to finish this book, worrying that the violent images would not allow me to sleep at night, the realization this book gave me was worth the struggle. It is clear that Yunqué planned for his book to have this effect on the reader. My own experiences perhaps helped me to have so much appreciation for this book. I grew up in a mostly white, wealthy suburban neighborhood, and there are many experiences that I have not lived through and many voices that I have not heard. There were very few Puerto Rican or African-American students in my school or neighborhood, and the only thing I knew about their struggles and culture is what I learned in school or saw on television. Since I began attending a university in Philadelphia, I feel I have gained a closer look into the lives of those who are different from me. Just today, I drove by several murals covering the sides of city buildings, dedicated to the lives of those African-Americans that have made an influence or simply faces that portray the struggles of everyday living. These murals brought me back to thinking about Yunqué's book, and the clarity it has given me in assessing such struggles. I have never been through many of the pains that others face, but through the characters in this novel I feel I have a much better understanding of the hardships others go through- a suffering that may be unique for each person, but is clearly present for everyone to face.
If you are ready for a shocking change in your own worldview, then pick up this book today. However, if you are not prepared to feel the pain of the characters and experience the hideous violence that these situations involve, then you should stay away from this book and its startling realities.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Reviewed as a literary work, not pop-comm
By Clay Ellis
Edgardo Vega Yunqué has written an epic of over six hundred pages about the lives of ordinary persons of the New York City he seems to intimately know and of the jazz music he obviously loves and the musicians who played it and brought it out of the backstreets and into the world. Though his characters are those whom you might find alongside you waiting for a subway his treatment of them is not ordinary. We see their hopes and fears and loves and failures just as we see around ourselves.
There is romance but there is no Priscilla Heatherwood who meets, and immediately hates, Lance Sterling whom she later learns has been misunderstood and falls in love with and has sex with him, not necessarily in that order, and they ride off into the bedroom of endless orgasms. His love scenes are written to further the story, not merely thrown in every fifteen pages to keep a bored housewife titillated.
One must reference the old as a benchmark to evaluate the new and I am reminded of Faulkner and Hemingway. Yunqué uses sentences as long as did Faulkner. The very first paragraph of the work uses ninety-nine words in only two sentences. When I read Faulkner I many times must reread and carefully parse each phrase of a sentence to learn what is the "meat" of it because Faulkner seemed to shake a handful of words from the dictionary and strew these across the page, hoping the jumble made sense and not caring if it truly did not. Yunqué's sentences are realized to be long only if one notes the punctuation. Whereas Faulkner's writing became so "way-out" that the reader's suspension of disbelief (a necessity for all fiction) was, itself, suspended, Yunqué's writing has not this defect.
Yunqué's characters and settings are those Hemingway might have chosen but Yunqué's style is one Hemingway should have chosen. When reading Hemingway the reader stomps short-concise-sentence by short-concise-sentence down the page and each detail gets its own subject-verb-predicate-period. Yunqué's details weave into sentences as just that: details.
Don't pick this book to read between Sunday dinner and supper. Plan on spending a few evenings with it. You'll be forced to not skim because Yunqué does switch between present and flashback and characters as easily as his `Ricans do with Español and English. If I want to find flaws in it I must cite this as the prime flaw.
It's obvious that Yunqué has experienced, or at least delved into, the life and locations of which he writes; and tells of it very well. I'll not give you a synopsis of the plot, buy the book to get that, but will tell you only that it centers around the life of a young girl of mixed heritage and her friends and family. It deals with subjects which many find uncomfortable to discuss, but discuss these anyway. He uses words and characterizations which are not politically correct but are true to life, though we don't want to admit it.
There are no great idealizations nor a message to the world; just slices of life in the real and the raw told in a manner to hold our interest. I recommend it.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Zing! Went My Heartstrings
By Jason Yinger
To start with, I feel sorry for anyone who chooses not to read this novel based on some of the reviews posted about it. True, some of the scenes get to be a bit graphic at times, even uncomfortably so. Yet, for Yunque to have backed off would have robbed the reader of some vital touch of realness lacking in many authors, who are too chaste and concerned about what people will think to write what needs to be written. I find it ironic and more than a little sad to know that our society is one where we blithely glance over newspaper headlines of bombings and wars in foreign countries, as well as our own, and yet it is the subject matter of fictional novels which makes people rise up and shout: This is too much!
"No Matter How Much You Promise..." offers us a multifaceted view of the melting pot that is America. The novel, itself a fusion of ideas and sounds, ex-plores the connection between one girl and the Puerto Rican, American, Irish, and African American cultures which course through her veins. At times Vidamia seems invincible, armed with her goldcard (a 25,000 dollar limit) and her sassy P.R. attitude, but then a door opens for a moment and we catch a private glance of the struggle going on inside her.
Vital to the novel is the rich tradition of music that Yunque weaves into the story. From the Farrell family subway band, to Pop Butterworth's forgotten musical career, to Billy Farrell's own marred Jazz talent and more, music reaches into every aspect of the characters' lives. To read the novel without the accompaniment of the selections referred to within the story is like eating a sandwich without bread: you can still eat the contents without the bread, but obviously something is lacking. If nothing else, this novel should leave you with a greater appreciation for Jazz and related music.
The other draw to "No Matter How Much You Promise..." is the emotional rollercoaster that Yunque drags the reader onto. Personally, I was brought to a bout of weeping (as well as a night or two of subdued contemplation), the likes of which I have never experienced from a novel. I found Yunque's characterization of the 'Four Horsemen of Avenue B' as `a twisted quartet of perverted junior ex-ecutives of evil' to be horrifyingly perfect. There are no changes of heart or character here, they maintain their inherent evil all the way to the bitter (and I mean bitter) end. But don't be deterred by such emotional outbursts, as the story offers just as many high points as low. One section in particular will, if nothing else, crack a smile on your face, as Pop Butterworth harangues no one in particular with a wonderfully amusing (if not slightly blasphemous) sermon on the true account of the creation of man.
By the end of this novel, you will have wept with horror as well as with joy. You will never look at music, family, or yourself in the same way. While Yunque may get unnecessarily preachy at times, dealing with race, his symphonic narrative strives to touch your heart; and it does, over and over again.
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