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Lucy Scholes
NYT Syndicate
About halfway through Patricia Engel's sumptuous second novel, Reina Castillo, a young woman fleeing the demons of her past, stands on the deck of a boat contemplating her first dive into open water."Out here is where the ocean floor drops off," one of her more experienced companions explains, pointing to the darkness all around."Didn't you notice how clear and light the water is when we're closer to land? That's because it's not so deep. Then the ocean floor takes a big hit hundreds of feet down and you're out here, in the blue."
The Veins of the Ocean is its own willing plunge into deeper, darker realms. Like her critically acclaimed debut, Vida, an episodic collection of vignettes in the life of its central character, and the novel that followed, It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, this is the coming-of-age story of a young Colombian-American woman negotiating independence, romance and the ties of kith and kin.
However, with its richly layered narrative structure ” filled with the echoes, or ripples, of past events reverberating in the present ” and its deeply conflicted exploration of the tangled web of family loyalty and responsibility, the novel offers proof of its author's developing maturity.
The narrative opens with two acts of brazen, almost classically tragic, vengeance. Discovering that his wife has been unfaithful, Reina's father throws her 3-year-old brother, Carlito, off a bridge into Biscayne Bay. Rescued by a fisherman, he grows up as a golden child, treated"like he was baby Moses." But the Castillos are a family with"all sorts of inheritances." Confronted with his own fianc`e's infidelity, Carlito re-enacts his father's violent punishment, hurling her daughter to the sort of watery grave he himself had escaped. Yet the novel is no wild revenge tragedy; instead, it examines a tragedy's aftermath.
Carlito takes his own life before the state can do it for him ”"This is Florida, where they're cool about putting people to death" ” but only after Reina has put hers on hold with seven years' worth of weekends dedicated to visiting her brother in prison. Haunted by guilt over the role she played in provoking Carlito's crime, she leaves her old life in Miami behind, drawn south to the"drifter territory" of the languid, swampy Florida Keys,"where people go to forget and to be forgotten." There she meets Nesto Cadena, a Cuban mired in his own suffering, a man for whom the freedoms of democracy can't ease the estrangement he feels, having left his children back in Havana.
Engel writes with a raw realism that elevates her characters' mundane existence ” their failures and failings, hopes and dreams, pleasures and pains ” to something majestic. At the heart of her storytelling is a deep sense of compassion. This is a writer who understands that exile can be as much an emotional state as a geographical one, that the agony of leaving tugs against the agony of being left behind. She sees the potential danger faced by young women encountering the world and grasps with acute precision the"mixed-up, messy sort of love" that can shackle together the members of a family.
To immerse oneself in Engel's prose is to surrender to a seductive embrace, a hypnotic beauty that mingles submersion with submission:"You just want to go deep enough to arrive at that moment when your thoughts stop and all you feel is the water and your heartbeat."
