Let It Rain Coffee by Angie Cruz | Review

Before the good solid immigrant section of Manhattan that is Washington Heights turns into yet another deracinated artsy-yuppie wasteland, let it have a chronicler, and oh God, let it not be Angie Cruz. This is not to say that Cruz is a bad writer, or that Let It Rain Coffee is an entirely bad book. But it is a compromised book, and a reader hoping to get a revealing glimpse into the life and dreams of the struggling Dominicans of that neighborhood will be sorely disappointed.

What compromises Coffee is, ironically, its authors good intentions. Clearly, Cruz has a strong desire to portray in a sympathetic light the people she's left behind. Also as clearly, she is eager to bestow upon them the benefits of empowerment. But good intentions alone have never been, and never will be, enough to bring a story to life. Cruz is a controlled writer. Her phrasing is earful, her structure passable, she is well-educated in her craft. And there are fleeting moments when her characters do become flesh and blood. But these are too few and far between and never, at any point, do they coincide with crucial plot developments.

The book begins in the early 1990s when Don Chan, the slightly addled, newly widowed patriarch of the immigrant Colons, arrives in the Heights to live out his remaining days with his son's family. In Cruz's hands, the Don remains only a potentially fascinating character. The abandoned orphan of immigrants - Chinese laborers in the Caribbean - he has learned to love his adopted country of the Dominican Republic, enough to fight for its liberty during the oppressive days under Trujillo in the mid-60s. His son, Santo, is a former comrade in the struggle and now something of a disappointment; his daughter-in-law, Esperanza, is a hopelessly glamour-struck fan of the old nighttime soap Dallas, in fact has named her daughter Dallas and her son Bobby, after that TV show's most sympathetic character. There is palpable friction in this addition of yet one more body in the apartment, on the street, in the neighborhood. More instinctively perhaps than purposefully, Cruz is able to convey the skin-surface tension that infects the simple chores of day-to-day living in an area so packed (as anyone who's ever fought for a clean dryer in a St. Nicholas Avenue laundromat can tell you). The usual elements of tenement literature crop up. Santo is killed in his cab. Dallas's best friend dies in childbirth. Bobby goes to juvie. Esperanza spends too much money on finery and winds up in debt. And meanwhile back in the DR, Don Chan's other, beloved comrade in the struggle, Miraluz, gets fed up with the slave labor conditions in the garment factory where she works and starts up her own collective, with unbelievable ease.

Here, with this, I believe Cruz tips her hand.

What Cruz plainly believes - what she has invested an entire fictional account into - is her idea of capital. Not capitalism, let's be clear on this, or any other sort of ideology, but the idea that empowerment can only spring from a basis of accumulated and interactive resources, emotional and intellectual, as well as financial. This idea, facile as it sounds, must not be underestimated. To citizens of developed countries, capital is as natural as air or water, but to places that have never been stable enough, for whatever reason, to take root in the world's economy, it is more revolutionary than simply workers controlling the means of production.

You see Cruz's plan when Bobby uses the computer skills he learned in the joint to upgrade Miraluz's factory, or when Dallas, maturing emotionally, returns to Esperanza the money she's stolen from her, or when Esperanza herself decides to meet her debts head-on and open a bank account. While admirable, though, they remain just a plan. None of these developments happens organically, from character, and they ring false.

Esperanza's own awakening, the denouement of the book, is the best example. A Dallas soap fan, remember, through sheer coincidence she does happen to encounter on an ordinary commuter train none other than Bobby Ewing himself, that is to say the actor who portrayed him, Patrick Duffy. Duffy - who I did happen to meet in passing in Hollywood in the late 70s - in real life speaks in the precise, detached manner typical to practicing Buddhists and nothing like he does in this encounter. In other words, he is a distinct person, but in Coffee he is just another uninterested guy, strategically positioned to torment Esperanza and burst her bubble. When she, at last, is confronted with this absolute evidence that there's no Southfork, no bejeweled wife, no Bobby Ewing, that this generic white man has nothing to do with her or her existence, Esperanza finally faces reality. But it is a dreary climax, a disservice to a living person, and - worst of all - a squandered opportunity.

To stake a real and crucial moment in the life of her character on the portrayal of an actual person was a gamble, a literary gamble which the author badly lost, because Cruz still does not understand the nature of the game. Still, someday she might - and at that point her career will be one worth watching.

Originally published in Small Spiral Notebook, 2005.