The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

March 1, 1993
Hijuelos's second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love , won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and was a crossover sensation. His depiction of two Cuban brothers making music in New York City was hailed both for its intimate knowledge of immigrant life and for its unrestrained celebration of carnal delights. Here, Hijuelos has taken his trademark concerns--the travails of cultural assimilation and the wonders of the flesh--to extraordinary lengths, with mixed results. In a style that combines the exuberance of Garcia Marquez with the dogged genealogies of Oscar Lewis's La Vida , Hijuelos tells of the Montez O'Brien family of Cobbleton, Pa. Nelson O'Brien, an Irishman, meets Mariela Montez while he is fighting the Spaniards in her native Cuba in 1898. They fall in love and marry; Nelson embarks on a career as a photographer and moviehouse manager, and sires 15 children--14 daughters and one son, Emilio. Unfortunately, Hijuelos is unable to bring the huge family to life. Instead, he falls back upon a single observation--that the overwhelmingly female household exudes a feminine allure powerful enough to pull a circus pilot and his plane right out of the air, as happens in the book's opening scene. This magic realism (monarch butterflies and flocks of birds follow the sisters around) grows wearying after continued deployment, and the sexual coquettishness within the family (one sister suckles Emilio, another pines for his ``barbed masculinity'') borders on the deviant. The Montez O'Briens are followed from the Depression through the two world wars and Vietnam, and then up to the present, but this immigrant tale seems unnaturally beatific: Emilio goes to Hollywood, three sisters headline in New York nightclubs; another is a psychic; yet another sends a child to Yale. The predominant struggles are with love, and the ultimate consolations are in family. Unable to rope this sprawling brood into purposeful direction, Hijuelos loses his grip on the story, with a formal omniscient narration overwhelming what at times seems to be the older sister Margarita's point of view. Despite Hijuelos's matchless, soaring prose, the novel, like the poor airman, cannot stay aloft.