SYMPHONIC NOVEL Plot, characters create intrigue



Edgardo Vega Yunque makes it all fit together, rarely losing momentum.
EMILIANA SANDOVAL
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew it Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again: A Symphonic Novel," by Edgardo Vega Yunque (Farrar Straus & amp; Giroux, $25)
You're a busy person. You've got work, social commitments, family events, those weekly trips to Costco and Target. So should you invest a hefty portion of your valuable time in a 656-page symphonic novel?
Well, that depends. Are you intrigued by a sprawling family saga set against New York's Lower East Side? Are you interested in extensive, challenging conversations about what it means to be black, white, Puerto Rican or something in between? Can you believe in impossibly beautiful, precocious teen girls who talk like 40-year-olds? Can you stomach a horrific rape scene and some awful war memories?
And, most importantly, are you curious to read prose that corkscrews then unfolds, races forward and then loops back, shouts angrily then whispers tenderly, more like a flawless improvised jazz solo than a torrent of words?
Yes? OK then, hang on as novelist Edgardo Vega Yunque leaps between past and present, Puerto Rico and the mainland, New York and the South -- asking and answering questions about how race, class, gender, war, family, music, hatred, ignorance and passion shape people's lives.
Central character
The center of this ambitious book with the annoyingly long title is Vidamia Farrell, born to 16-year-old Puerto Rican homegirl Elsa and the blond, blue-eyed former Marine who was her brother Joey's best friend in Vietnam. That's Billy Farrell, the metaphorical Bill Bailey of the title, who was a dazzling jazz pianist in his teens but came back from the war a tortured man, missing two fingers and a huge chunk of his soul, unable to imagine playing again. After she gets pregnant, Elsa casts Billy away, seeing him as a hindrance to the upper-class life she's determined to have, but before he leaves he makes her promise to name the baby Vidamia -- "my life" in Spanish.
Twelve years later, Vidamia and Elsa are living very well in Tarrytown when Vidamia gets curious about her father and tracks him down in the Lower East Side. He's married and has four blond, musically talented, intelligent kids, and he's still unbalanced, unable to hold a job or get bloody memories of Joey's death out of his mind. Vidamia immediately fits into the Farrell brood, upsetting Elsa, who thinks her daughter can come to no good by wasting time with these flaky, hippie folks. Her mother's real concern, though, is that as Vidamia starts to investigate the Puerto Rican side of the family, the girl will find out yuppie Elsa's most shameful secret -- that they have African blood.
Sprawling and detailed
Vidamia does her mother one better. At 15, she falls in love with Wyndell, a hunky black musician six years older. She also becomes determined to get her father back on the piano bench. Here Vidamia starts to be a little much for a teenager. She's too perfect -- too mature, too smart, too beautiful, too enterprising, too talented. She has time to have poetic sex with Wyn, hang out with the Farrells, track down her Puerto Rican relatives, open a video store with her sister, get into Harvard without ever seeming to study, all while living in two places. She's too close to becoming Puerto Rican Barbie, and this does a disservice to the points Yunque wants to make about race and how it divides and unites America.

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