By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Like so many
of Oscar Hijuelos' earlier novels, "Empress of the Splendid Season" is
a chronicle
of familial
love that unfurls in New York over the last five decades. It is another
tale of a Cuban
family, torn
between fading memories of life back home in Cuba and the glittering promises
of the
American Dream,
between the centripetal powers of kinship and tradition and the centrifugal
forces
of history and
generational change.
Whereas Hijuelos'
two best known novels, "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" (1989)
and "The Fourteen
Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien" (1993), worked these themes on a
colorful, epic
canvas, "Empress" is a smaller, more modest book. It is less fecund in
its peopling
of a fictional
world, less ambitious in its orchestration of overlapping stories. Even
its language
tends to be
less expansive,less exuberant than its predecessors.
Because Hijuelos
is such a fluent writer, because he writes with such affection for his
characters,
the novel is
not without its rewards, but it remains, in contrast to his earlier books,
an oddly
attenuated piece
of fiction, lacking both the energy of "Mambo Kings" and "Sisters" and
the
fierce narrative
control of " Ives' Christmas" (1995). In fact it often feels like a tired
reworking
of old material,
a musty, paint-by-numbers version of Hijuelos' favorite preoccupations
and
motifs, brightened
with a few splashes of inspiration.
The title character
of "Empress" is Lydia Espana, a Cuban emigre who has been a cleaning woman
since her husband,
Raul, a waiter, began having heart problems. Lydia, who carries herself
"with the
imperious attitude
of a young movie starlet," strikes many of her acquaintances as snobbish,
self-pitying
and pretentious. She likes to think she has more in common with the cultivated
people
she works for
than with many of her neighbors, and she imposes a strict code of behavior
and dress
on her children.
In quick, summary
fashion, Hijuelos sketches in Lydia's history and the events that transformed
her from "the
Empress of the Splendid Season" into "Lydia the Spanish cleaning lady."
Lydia, we're
told, was the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do Cuban businessman who kicked
her out of the
house when he found out about her affair with a middle-aged man. She left
Cuba
for New York
in 1947 and soon found her movie-fueled dreams of America -- "where life
was
all pearl necklaces,
fancy mansions, speak-easies, gangsters, cowboys and unbelievably
glamorous women
or drop-dead handsome men" -- dissolving in the fetid gloom of a sweatshop
where she worked
as an apprentice seamstress.
Cleaning rich
people's apartments is something of an improvement, but it's still
a demeaning job,
and it's portrayed
by Hijuelos in flat, generic terms that substitute clumsy symbolism for
the mythic
resonance of
his earlier books.
Hijuelos makes
broad generalizations about cleaning women daydreaming about "winning new
washing machines
on the 'Queen for a Day' television show," and wearing tennis shoes and
"thick
nylons with
runs in them." He writes about the hardships endured by cleaning women
with children --
women "who dragged
themselves out of bed early in the mornings and, leaving the kids with
a
neighbor, if
they could, worked six days a week and still could never earn enough to
make ends
meet."
He tries to flesh
out Lydia's experience with little vignettes about other cleaning women
she knows:
one who won
the lottery and moved from the Bronx to Astoria, Queens; another who scrimped
and
saved with her
husband to buy a bungalow in the Catskills, only to die of cancer shortly
after retiring
from her job.
None of these
walk-on characters develops into a memorable human being, and the same
might be
said of Lydia's
employers, a motley assortment of rich people and eccentrics whose lives
Lydia
vicariously
enjoys. Even Osprey, her favorite employer, who helps her son, Rico, remains
a strangely
fuzzy collection
of class stereotypes: a wealthy, aristocratic lawyer who knew President
Eisenhower,
who liked to
travel abroad and who treated his staff with paternalistic affection.
Throughout the
novel, the contrast drawn between Osprey's life and Lydia's feels mechanical
and
pat. His world
is filled with "glamour and money, cleanliness and good manners," while
hers is
defined by what
she will never do: "Never buy a piece of property. Never own a firsthand
car.
Never sit by
a late 19th-century French writing desk at the Armory Show, scribbling
out checks
without a single
doubt."
A similar predictability
attends Hijuelos' depiction of the generational disputes within the Espana
family: just
as a sexually precocious Lydia rebelled against her strict father, so her
liberated daughter
Alicia rebels
against her; and just as Lydia grew estranged from her family, so her children
drift away
from her. This
sort of schematic rendering of the schisms in the Espana clan stands in
sharp contrast
to the highly
nuanced dissection of the familial bonds of love, resentment and regret
found in the
author's earlier
novels, and it's qualified only by Hijuelos' sympathetic rendering of the
difficulties
Rico has leaving
the world of his parents behind.
Propelled by
his mother's expectations, Rico works hard in school, goes to college and
grad school
and becomes
a highly paid psychotherapist, ministering to well-heeled yuppies. In achieving
success,
however, Rico
has misplaced his sense of self. There is a chilliness to his dealings
with his parents
now, and he
eventually realizes that he belongs nowhere, neither to his mother's world
in Harlem nor
to Osprey's
world on Park Avenue. He has become an emotional exile, disconnected from
both his
past and his
present.
Rico's story,
detailed in the final chapters of "Empress," closes the novel on a persuasive
note but
does not make
up for the perfunctory tone of much of his mother's saga. From another
writer,
"Empress" might
read like a promising work of fiction, filled with hints of better things
to come. From
the richly talented
Hijuelos, who has spoiled his readers until now, it comes as a disappointment.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company