Growing Through the Ugly

Buzzy Digit, a dead Chicano soldier returning from Vietnam in a coffin at the age of 18, narrates Vasquez's uneven first novel, a dark and disquieting account of growing up in the El Paso barrio in the late 1950s and '60s. Abandoned by his parents, raised by his Abuelita (grandmother), Buzzy grows up a closet sissy in an environment rife with death, incest, whoring, rape and drug use before jumping a train out of El Paso at age 13 and enlisting in the Army. Struggling to find his own place amid his extended family and the desperation of his surroundings, Buzzy speaks in a language that is forceful but fragmented, energetically bilingual and laced with dreamy images of the sex and the squalor that permeate his world. But Buzzy doesn't moralize about his circumstances, choosing to offset harsh and unhappy memories with comic scenes of playing Little League baseball, sexual romps with his cousin Rosemary and rhapsodic expressions of his own despair and estrangement (""I was weeping in the quilted night when I sinned with thousands of sinners, breaking our flesh against the stars""). Buzzy's is an episodic, often slapdash story, lacking the focus and refinement that a practiced novelist would bring to it. Yet Vasquez, whose poetry has been anthologized in books like New Chicana/Chicano Writing, exhibits a voice that is singular, tragic and offers a fresh take on a tumultuous and destitute boyhood in the borderlands of southwest Texas. Foreign rights sold in Italy, France and the Netherlands. (Feb.)