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Full of rebellious comedy and vitality... Goldman's autobiographical immersion answers the urgent cry of memory... [He] is a natural storyteller - funny, intimate, sarcastic, all-noticing.' James Wood, New Yorker
Francisco Goldman's first novel since his acclaimed, nationally bestselling Say Her Name (winner of the Prix Femina étranger), Monkey Boy is a sweeping story about the impact of divided identity - whether Jewish/Catholic, white/brown, native/expat - and one misfit's quest to heal his damaged past and find love.
Our narrator, 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 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 spectre of Frank's recently deceased father, Bert, an immigrant from Ukraine - pathologically abusive, yet also at times infuriatingly endearing - as well as the dramatic Guatemalan woman who helped raise him, and the high school bullies who called him 'monkey boy,' all loom.
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.
Francisco Goldman's first novel since his acclaimed, nationally bestselling Say Her Name (winner of the Prix Femina étranger), Monkey Boy is a sweeping story about the impact of divided identity - whether Jewish/Catholic, white/brown, native/expat - and one misfit's quest to heal his damaged past and find love.
Our narrator, 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 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 spectre of Frank's recently deceased father, Bert, an immigrant from Ukraine - pathologically abusive, yet also at times infuriatingly endearing - as well as the dramatic Guatemalan woman who helped raise him, and the high school bullies who called him 'monkey boy,' all loom.
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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Reviews
"...a story that travels relentlessly between a difficult present and an unfinished past....In this case, bringing together the child and the seasoned adult may involve a kind of spiritual revolution, a casting off of the past by a reliving of it, a turn in the middle years toward a different way of being... he must change his life...At the heart of the novel's own tenacity and optimism is Frankie
The New Yorker
"Francisco Goldman's new novel, Monkey Boy... is positively boiling over with original metaphors and insights...he's a writer of real force and originality...with rare vitality and humor...This book is about all these women, and how alive they are, but not just as presences who appear and speak for themselves. It's also about how vivid these women are in the mind, and in the interior life, of the
Literary Hub
"The novel gently insists on the relationship between...two realms of intimate violence...This did not come at the cost of [Goldman's] youthful tenderness, the quality that makes Monkey Boy so moving."
TLS