Oscar Hijuelos: Writer of Work

Abstract

, Oscar Hijuelos published "Lunch at the Biltmore," 1 a short nonfiction piece about a period, as the opening phrase tells us, "[i]n the autumn of 1959" when he suffered from the physical travails of a kidney infection and his father grappled with the aftershocks of a heart attack. The piece includes the standard fare for which Hijuelos is known. Starting with the opening reference to 1959, "Lunch at the Biltmore" provides a glimpse into Hijuelos's engagement with Cuba and the influence of Cuban culture on his family. He remembers eating "suckling pig (lechón)" and "a journey I'd made to Cuba." The Spanish language regularly enters the descriptions: "A quiet man, un tipo muy callado, he said little to me." The recurrent invocation of Cuba in Hijuelos's oeuvre accounts for the way he has been represented in academic literary studies. Most critical work about Hijuelos's fiction focuses on Cuban American culture, raises questions about the influence of television and music in U.S. constructions of Cubanness, and positions his fiction within debates about Latino identity-formation. 2 Karen Christian, for example, argues that the mambo performance in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love 3 unravels essentialist and fixed notions of nationality and gender. "The hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity of these characters (their excess) makes them resemble drag performers whose objective is to perform convincing gender illusions," Christian writes. 4 But to focus on ethnic or gender identity without considering the socially symbolic and material function of economic conditions, particularly occupations, is to gloss over an important dimension of Hijuelos's fiction, which constantly reminds us that people spend more time working L. Di Iorio Sandín et al. (eds.