The Problem of Empathy
You may have encountered the supposed Native American wisdom: "To truly understand another, you must first walk in their moccasins." This sentiment expresses the difference between empathy and sympathy, where we must somehow enter into the life of another to fully appreciate their predicament. Anything less provides a shallow perception of the difficulty of others, preserving their otherness and maintaining the comfort of our own separation from their situation.
While fiction in general maintains a boundary between the mundane world of experience and the imagined world of possibility, it does offer the state of catharsis most developed in tragedy. Readers, and their counterpart in theater audiences, feel the anguish and pain of protagonists in the safe environment of the fiction, and withdraw from the story after its conclusion somehow changed, but uninjured.
Who can remain aloof from the tragic stories of Oedipus Rex or Romeo and Juliet? They wrench rivers of sorrow, anger, lust, and grief from onlookers and then apply the healing balm of universality and fate, creating vessels in which we may safely carry those elemental forces of the human psyche into our ordinary lives. This provides the means for individuals to navigate their own crises with poise and dignity.
Split Consciousness
It takes a master to create powerful tragedy on the stage or in a novel. Maintaining focus intensifies the emotional hooks that draw us into the tragic characters. Generally we only have enough capacity to identify with one tragic hero: Antigone, Dido, Oedipus, Hamlet or the couple Romeo and Juliet. Attempts to widen the scope of the tragic risks diffusing that energy among lesser characters.
Henriquez attempts to evoke the tragic muse in her story, but fails to focus upon a single character or unit. She instead alternates her narrative between various first person perspective accounts, mostly between Alma, Maribel’s mother, and Mayor, with other minor characters stepping in occasionally to provide milieu and community. This suggests that Henriquez regarded the tragic circumstances of Maribel and Mayor as central to her plot, but she fails to engage us fully with the predicament of the adolescent couple or Maribel’s mother Alma.
Oddly missing from this jumble of first person narratives is Maribel. We are not allowed into her mind, possibly because of her brain damage. She remains unapproachable, except in some extent through Mayor. This handicaps the tragic potential of her and Mayor’s budding romance. It also foils the tragic potential of her injury and subsequent mistreatment by society.
Similarly, we are not taken into Alma’s deepest emotions. She no doubt feels great love for her daughter, and a degree of guilt in the part she played in her daughter’s injury, but we never experience her emotions directly. Instead Alma relates events as if she were telling us her story rather than encouraging us to live it by stepping into her shoes. We are continually pulled away from her deepest inner life by the shifting point of view which structures the novel.
Descent Into Melodrama
Dante’s Divine Comedy led us into the depths of Hell via his first person narrator, guided by the spirit of the great poet Virgil and later, outside the Inferno, via the soul of his lost love Beatrice. The Comedy also includes numerous stories by those condemned to eternal suffering, but always through the mind of the narrator. We never step outside his mind.
Henriquez loses that narrative focus by oscillating among various characters, each telling their story, but without a central mind that perceives them. This jostling point of view creates a documentary form rather than an intimate narrative experience and interrupts the dramatic flow of events. Perhaps she feels she is providing some narrative relief, but in reality she robs the reader of total immersion.
Alma reports on her struggles with communicating, purchasing food, securing services for her daughter, and attempting to maintain a normal family life through the tensions of an unemployed husband and loss of visa legality. Mayor reports on his difficulties with his father, other bullying students at school, and his frustrated attempts to further a friendship and later romantic relationship with Maribel. Interspersed among these events are completely unrelated life histories of unimportant characters.
Notably absent is any insight into the two characters that precipitate the violent climax, the boy from the gas station Garret and his homicidal father. Perhaps Henriquez did not want to depart from her format of only giving voice to the immigrants, but to prevent our peering into the lives of two pivotal characters in the story is to condemn them as stereotypical epitomes of evil. They become the agents of misery always present in melodrama.
We never enter deeply into any one character. Nor do we experience any true sense of agency they might have in directing their lives. They act according to inner drives and outside circumstances, but we never accept them as fully functioning human beings taking charge. We see instead a series of impotent characters who fill slots provided by an impersonal society.
This lack of connection ultimately transforms personal tragedy from something we feel into something we look at. They are words in a news story or second-rate actors on an amateur stage. The characters lack the depth and solidity to create the intense emotional involvement demanded by poverty, abuse, injustice, and oppression. Instead we see these mishaps as plot elements that drive the narrative forward, creating tension and a sense of dread, without any of the deep human commitment to the plight of the protagonist, or the intense psychic pain of the perpetrators.
Objective Treatment
Authors who empathize with their characters treat them with respect and confer upon them whatever dignity they deserve, regardless of their circumstances. This establishes a degree of trust between the author and her characters, and between the reader and the author. All of these entities share a common humanity and internalize that bond through carefully protecting everyone’s personal integrity.
Henriquez violates that trust in several instances, most notably with her indelicate handling of Mayor’s involuntary reaction to Maribel’s reciprocal desire. What should remain as an intensely personal event emerges into the limelight when a neighbor spies Mayor exiting his father’s car with a wet spot on his pants, after an intense make-out session with Maribel. The author then compounds the betrayal by having that neighbor relay this information to Maribel’s parents. Henriquez treats these highly vulnerable characters as objects to be manipulated and exploited.
While this shocking revelation propels the plot, giving Alma and her husband the justification for cutting off contact between Maribel and her newfound friend / lover, it does so at a huge cost: parading something sweet and innocent between two adolescents in front of the adult world, with all of its prejudices and taboos. Henriquez violates Mayor’s privacy for dramatic effect. This destroys not only the budding romance, but our trust in the author.
She treats other characters with similar brutality. Alma herself carries guilt for her daughter’s accident, making her somehow complicit in the unfolding debacle. Her husband’s demeaning employment at the mushroom farm degrades into an endless stream of rejection when he loses his job and searches for another. Never mind that he was a skilled tradesman in his home country, providing essential shelter for not only his own family, but for others.
Chains of Victims
Henriquez injects a moral component into her novel by depicting the immigrants as hard-working, honest people subject to injustice and exploitation. This chain begins back home, where political or economic motives create intolerable conditions for these people. The author does this to build sufficient pressure to force her characters to abandon their homes and move to the United States.
Once there in the supposed promise land, the oppression continues in new forms, social and economic, where established citizens exploit the newcomers and continually remind them of their perilous status as immigrants. Forces beyond anyone’s control, such as the Great Recession of 2008-2009 further emphasizes this hierarchy of misery. Nobody escapes.
Both Maribel’s and Mayor’s parents deepen this descent into oppression by their heavy-handed parental interference in their adolescent children’s unfolding lives. Mayor’s father continually restricts his son’s freedom. Maribel’s mother stifles her daughter’s recovery with overly-protective surveillance.
Henriquez justifies these recursive levels of victimization by injecting a real sense of danger, brought to horrifying light when Alma rescues her daughter from the clutches of Garret, the teenage miscreant who attempts to rape Maribel. Alma’s appeal for police protection goes nowhere, since by her interrupting the crime, no crime was committed.