BookBrowse Reviews The Consequences by Manuel Munoz

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An understated collection of stories in which characters struggle with trust, choices and isolation.

The first story in Manuel Muñoz's The Consequences, "Anyone Can Do It," sets the tone for the collection in its opening line: "Her immediate concern was money." "Her" refers to Delfina, whose husband has been taken in an immigration raid involving the working men in her neighborhood. Suspicious of others, Delfina nevertheless chooses to risk allying herself with another woman, Lis, for the chance to do paid work. Here and in the following stories, which are set mostly in California's Central Valley and Texas, presumably around the 1980s and '90s, the fact that money is a concern for many characters is a given. But money and other practical concerns also serve as reasons for people to do what they want and what they don't want — to allow themselves to be pushed and pulled in certain directions, to push and pull others. Their lives may be crowded with lack and necessity, but this doesn't make the choices that they are faced with any less complex or more obvious.

Like Delfina, other characters in Muñoz's collection struggle with trust. In the title story, Mark works a dull job in Fresno and spends weekends clubbing in Los Angeles. One night he has sex with a driftless younger man named Teddy and spontaneously proposes that they move in together. He doesn't believe that Teddy is sincere when he says yes; Mark is unable to imagine what he has to offer beyond financial support. Mark fears himself to be at risk of being used by Teddy, but he doesn't consider the effects of his own contradictory and skeptical behavior.

In "Compromisos," another tale of self-thwarted desire, Mauricio, who has split from his wife due to his tryst with a man, is halfheartedly inspired to win her back when his male lover shuts down the possibility of a future together. In a moment of clarity, Mauricio reflects that one's emotions cannot be dismissed or outrun, and that "life could have been so different if he had been a little braver about what he was feeling." While it isn't clear what, exactly, could have been different for him, or what precisely he wants, he seems to recognize that he has made a mistake in not being honest with himself and others. The story title, a Spanish word that translates to "commitments" and can also take on the meaning of "compromises," highlights the question of whether there has to be a contradiction between being true to oneself and true to others, or if in fact one of these states is reliant upon the other.

Some stories and individual features of stories are more engaging than others. Characters can be so stripped down as to seem formless, which can have a dulling effect, as in "Presumido," where Juan struggles to assimilate to living alongside his partner Daryl's socially adept friends in a white neighborhood. We get little sense of Juan apart from this struggle. However, in this case and others, the spareness feels stylistically deliberate, as it appears to represent how a character's circumstances have rendered him a husk of himself. This emptiness is enhanced by the supernatural in "Susto," in which a worker who finds the dead body of an older Mexican man is possibly haunted by the man's ghost. Race, culture, class, sexuality and citizenship are organically coded into the stories' atmospheres in a way that lets the reader feel the significance of these factors in how characters move through the world.

The title story is given an illuminating extra layer with the closing piece in the collection, "What Kind of Fool Am I?," which expands on the background of Teddy, known in his small Texas hometown as Teo, through the eyes of his sister, Bea, who like her brother feels trapped in a limited space by their parents' expectations. By including Bea's perspective, which contradicts certain assumptions the reader may have gathered from Mark's point of view, Muñoz adds unexpected depth to her story, to Teddy's, and to the collection as a whole. Here and throughout, The Consequences is well-crafted, thematically sound and subtly surprising.

This review first ran in the October 19, 2022 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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