Monkey Boy is a sweeping story about the impact of divided identity-whether Jewish/Catholic, white/brown, native/expatriot-and one misfit’s quest to heal his damaged past and find love.
Our protagonist, Francisco Goldberg, an American writer, has been living in Mexico when, because of a threat provoked by his journalism, he flees to New York City, hoping to start afresh. His last relationship ended devastatingly five years before, and he may now finally be on the cusp of a new love with a young Mexican woman whom he meets in Brooklyn. But Francisco is soon beckoned back to his childhood home outside Boston by a high school girlfriend, who witnessed his youthful humiliations, and to visit his Guatemalan mother, Yolanda, whose intermittent lucidity unearths forgotten pockets of the past.
On this five-day trip, the specter looms of Frank’s recently deceased father, Bert, an immigrant from Ukraine–pathologically abusive, yet also at times infuriatingly endearing-as do images of the dramatic Guatemalan woman who helped raise him and the high school bullies who called him “monkey boy.”
Told in an intimate, irresistibly funny, and passionate voice, this extraordinary portrait of family and growing up “halfie” unearths the hidden cruelties in a predominantly white, working-class Boston suburb where Francisco came of age and explores the pressures of living between worlds all his life.
Monkey Boy is a new masterpiece of fiction from one of the most important American voices in the last forty years.
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“Monkey Boy…despite exposing historical, generational, familial denial and horror, ultimately proves to be a beguiling, surprisingly droll portrait of an unsettled middle-aged man (still) searching for love and (self-)acceptance."
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Shelf Awareness