Style shines but plot is wanting in story of aching for homeland

Oscar Delossantos, who for 22 years has taught a variety of courses at a Jesuit boys’ school, has recently been dismissed for a perceived indiscretion. So Delossantos, the narrator of “Loosing My Espanish,” uses his last elective class, Histories of Latin America: From Colonialism to the 1960s, to deliver, in the form of 34 unrehearsed lectures, a phantasmagoric portrait of his small Cuban American community in Chicago.

Along the way, author H.G. Carrillo offers something else in this debut novel: a survey of a people longing for a lost homeland who now belong to a country that promises fulfillment to immigrants but often delivers only sadness.

Meet Ama, Dona Cristina, Roman, Senor Ostrovski, Dona Liliana. They might work at Walgreen’s, reminisce about the high-society sugar princess of their native island and dream of harvesting bananas in a cold milieu. There also are tragic tales of kids disappearing through a hole in the ice, fires caused by a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s, romances to the tune of a bolero. Their misadventures juxtapose the personal and the collective, the factual and the fictional. Indeed, Carrillo follows his characters in chapter after chapter in search of powerful images of exile and assimilation.

This is an inviting idea: to compose a deliberately centrifugal structure that makes storytelling its leitmotif. The problem is that the whirlwind of anecdotes and innuendoes has no actual center. The reader has trouble identifying with the characters. Instead, there is a sense of loss and disorientation. Could this be intentional?

Carrillo is a product of fine arts programs in which students are taught how to write. “Loosing My Espanish,” at least in form, is formulaic. So much so that reading to the end felt like a chore.

It is, however, written with a level of style that shines. Its sentences twist and turn, first embracing then rejecting pure, uncontaminated English and Spanish. The result is a delicious hodgepodge -- known today as Spanglish -- that reflects bipolar minority cultures that exist in a permanent state of transition.

Recently corporations and institutions such as Hallmark, Taco Bell and even the U.S. Army have embraced this hybrid style. And movies like James L. Brooks’ “Spanglish” prove it is no longer an unacceptable, peripheral mode of communication but a legitimate, even marketable one. Artists and intellectuals also have joined the fiesta. The number of books (fiction, poetry, even a theatrical adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy “Romeo and Juliet”) has multiplied exponentially. Examples range from Sandra Cisneros’ melodic “Caramelo” to Susana Chavez-Silverman’s subversive “Killer Cronicas.”

A linguistic wizard, author Carrillo creates in “Loosing My Espanish” a syncopated, jazzy rhythm: “Escuchen Senores,” he writes, “hombres jovenes; all you who have sat in these seats over the past several years; mensajeros del futuro; mis iluminadores, mis casas, mis escuelas, mis corazones, mis playas; mi sentido comun; mis yuccas locos -- I forget all the names that I have had for you -- Shiny Distant Shores. Even yesterday [is] too long ago, a fever-dream broken into floes of hunger and want and then more want, it is so far away now.”

Notice that none of these words is italicized: Spanglish, Carrillo seems to argue, is not an either/or but an entity unto itself.

Such sustained linguistic bravura allows for some endearing moments. But verbal pyrotechnics cannot substitute for plot. Still, “Loosing My Espanish” is an ambitious mess, rather like the draft of a promising young talent still in need of advice.

Carrillo’s excesses should serve as a cautionary lesson. Latino literature, a centuries’ old tradition north of the Rio Grande, has undergone a veritable revival in the last couple of decades. A plethora of fascinating works have been released by mainstream New York publishers as well as by mid-size and small presses.

There is much that is available but only a fraction of it has quality. Some books feel like mere tokens in a publisher’s catalog, the Latino voice in an ethnic symphony. It will take some time to separate the flowers from the weeds.

One thing is clear, however. There is an abundance of talent and rushing work to print does a disservice to everyone.

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Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, is that author of “Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language.”