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CS Lewis said one should have sympathy and understanding of the genre of any work one reviews. Jonathan wants the untraditional, on the other hand. This will be untraditional. I am not even sure what the genre of Orange Messiahs is, except that it is an “e-book”.
Some people like computers. Personally I think the invention of the silicon diode was the biggest misapplication of technology since the replacement of ceramics with bronze. If it weren't for the chip, we would have had to develop a space fleet just to service the tubes in our comsats, and I'd be hip deep in hydroponics on the moon, instead of facing Armageddon and the numbering Beast.
Furthermore, I don't like reading over the computer. I like books that I can read as I bathe, without fear of electrocution. I printed out a copy of Orange Messiahs, but still had to deal with some technical difficulties and cognitive dissonances. Technically, it was still difficult to read 113 loose-leaf pages in the tub without getting them wet, or even to read them sitting without my anal-compulsion continually forcing me to check that the pages were still in order and aligned. I was finally reduced to setting on the floor with two piles in front of me, and a chapter in hand. Also, the print was uncomfortably small.
Those were mere technical difficulties. The cognitive dissonance lay in the fact that I could not convince my subconscious I was looking at a book when my eyes beheld a manila folder filled with typesheets. Looking at the folder did not remind me I was reading. Looking for the story in my highly visual mental memory, I was nonplussed by the lack of an image of a cover to use as a flag for the mental file.
Orange Messiahs is not the sort of story I read. I like science fiction, and at one point didn’t read anything non-science fiction written before 1945, on the grounds that those naïve Neanderthals had nothing important to talk about. Orange Messiahs has no extraterrestrials, although it does feature illegal aliens, and the only technological change mentioned is when the family graduates from black and white to color with a remote.
Broadly speaking, Orange Messiahs is a “Southwestern”, an example of Latina fiction. As such, it does have characters that originated in the El Paso-Juarez metroplex, which gave me a personal connection. The scene in which the matriarch crosses the river, then gives birth, was very moving, in part because I have seen that stretch of the river, and can imagine it on a morning in 1950.
It was during that birth that the characters became real to me. The nature of the connection was due only in small part to the quality of the writing, at least relative to other passages. It may have been primarily due to the fact that for once in my life, aside from when I read John Rechy’s City Lights, I was encountering a scene occurring in a location I can picture from what I know.
On reviewing that passage just now, I saw again the movie my mind made from the river I know and the story I have often heard repeated, so often that I was ready to see it depicted in my mind. The image of the pregnant wetback struggling to cross the river and have her child born in Nortreamerica is the quintessential image of human hope in the Texas borderland, comparable to what Eliza crossing another river once meant.
But El Paso quickly dropped out of the story.
So besides being Southwestern, what genre is Orange Messiahs? As its subtitle, A Saga of Seven Stories, indicates, it is a multi-view story of a family tragedy, which is to say it is a story of life, with births, and deaths, and changes. The premise is that a young screenwriting student is writing her family’s story, using a mixture of “as told to” accounts, writings of older family members, and, if I understood her intentions correctly, imaginative reconstructions.
Which brings me to its greatest flaw, or its greatest strength, in my reading. All the characters speak with a single voice, rather in conversations that are reconstructed or in what are passed off as their own writings, whether they are highly anglicized mas major Latins, Jews raised in orphanages and foster-homes, or allegedly inarticulate Anglo engineers from Everyville in some state that starts with a vowel, the same narrative voice is used, a erudite and poetic voice, quite pleasant to read.
This is what I saw as the flaw. I saw no trace of difference due to culture among the characters. All were highly intelligent, well-read, and up-to-date with the most up-to-date thought in their respective milieus as they were in the late 60s early 70s. I would have enjoyed more of those milieus than I was shown, though. If you are looking for a mind-bending trip through 60s hip, Orange Messiahs is not it.
The majority of the characters are female, and I found the descriptions of their experiences believable. Particularly moving is the story of Donna, the teenage mother who commits suicide. Her death inspires the matriarch to write four poems, three of which I enjoyed, although all four poems were very good, and I tip my hat to the author, Scott A. Sonders, for apparently achieving a woman’s voice in poetry. The conclusion of the poem on Donna’s suicide and cremation, “…the smell of fire comes only from what is burning” is as fine a poetic statement of the nature of causes and consequences as I have ever read. The third poem, about continually hoping, waiting, to be “abducted” by friendly aliens in a spaceship amused me terribly. As I said, Orange Messiahs has no extraterrestrials. It was nice to know Sonders also missed them.
Indeed, it was after reading the poetry I achieved the suspension of disbelief. From that point on, I forgot the self described Angelino author who, I suspect, is as “Native American” as I am, and thought of the book I was reading as the metafictional creation of an anglicized Latina screenwriting student. The “flaw” of the single voice was understandable, and from that point, my criticisms were pointed at her, not at Sonders, and I forgave her the poor depiction of places she had not been, and milieus she had not known. Inconsistencies in the stated events and failures in style and clarity I blamed on the narrator.
With this as my understanding of what I was reading, I arrived at the end in some wonder as to what actually happened, and what the “screenwriter” made up. The story’s greatest strength, in my reading, is that I suspect Sonders does not know either. I will not tell what event may, or may not have occurred, but it has to do with sex.
One man’s erotica is pornography to another. I decided years ago that I was not interested in either erotica or battle scenes, and I discovered that, while it is important to read the battle scenes in order to know who dies and how, I can find out who came in a sex scene by glancing at the end. That is enough to let me know if I am likely to have missed any plot development. I skipped a fair amount of Orange Messiahs this way, but there was a sex scene I had to read in order to be told about the sexual-religious kinks of the female twin. It was not something I enjoyed reading about.
Nor is it something I understood. I admit I am currently disenchanted with every manifestation of religion from the personal to the institutional, and my Texas Protestant Secular cultural background leaves me especially unappreciative of Mexican Catholic religion, but I failed to see how the alleged religious piety of two of the characters was integral to their personalities, or even how it was manifested, aside from some sexual practices that I suspect are meant to seem perverted to a Catholic sensibility, but which worry me about as much as eating pork. Yet the ending turns, apparently, on this religious sensibility. The abruptness of it to my no doubt spiritually benighted eyes smacks of a literal deus ex machina. Now, I admit, my take on both the sex and the religion may be a good example of why Lewis says one should have sympathy and understanding of the genre of any work one reviews.
There is a good deal of abruptness in the ending as it stands. I suspect this is due to Orange Messiahs being only about the first third of a larger work. The story as told is the story of things happening to functional people. There are hints of extreme dysfunctionality in the family’s subsequent history, and in the narrator’s own life, that are not covered. Mind you, dysfunctionality is relative. If we take the biblical patriarchs as the example of what a family is meant to be, we have one case of brothers selling one of their number into slavery, one of one brother defrauding the other and his father, and one of a man keeping a concubine who had his child. The world still hasn’t seen the last of that fight. By those standards, this family is still eminently functional. The male twin even follows the road taken by the brothers of Dineh.
I think that the abruptness in the ending would possibly be altered in a revised version taking the story down through its descent to the promised horror. If Mr. Sonders does continue the story, I would read it.
T. S. Ross is a staff reviewer for Unlikely 2.0. check out his full bio page.