No Matter How Much You Promise . . .: A Symphonic Novel - Hardcover

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Like its oversize title, this is the kind of novel that refuses to leave anything out. Vega Yunque seems determined to take D. H. Lawrence at his word and produce the "bright book of life," the whole messy sprawl of living and dying. He fails, of course, but in failing, he produces an almost hypnotically readable novel--about jazz, about race, about coming-of-age, and above all, about New York. The central character is Vidamia Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who starts the book by looking for her father, then tries to save him, and along the way, attempts to understand all there is to understand about love, music, and racism. A tall order for a teenager, even an absurdly precocious one, so it's no surprise she needs a little help. Vega Yunque gives it to her in the form of a plethora of other characters and stories, stretching from Manhattan's East Village to Puerto Rico and the Appalachians and encompassing cameos from Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Darwin. The heart of the story, though, is Vidamia and her Irish father, Billy, piano prodigy and Vietnam vet, tortured by memories of the war and the wound that cost him his jazz career. When Vega Yunque isn't climbing on his own soapbox to declaim, Thackeray-like, on the virtues and shortcomings of his characters, he's propping those same characters up on their own soapboxes. But just as one's tolerance for such overweening verbiage grows thin, along comes a moment of such honest, wrenching emotion, free of all artifice, that we shrug our shoulders and plow on. Vega Yunque is an infuriating, utterly undisciplined writer, but he may just be the Thomas Wolfe of the multicultural twenty-first century. Bill Ott
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Yunque's sprawling, old-fashioned debut, a multigenerational melting-pot epic set in New York City in the 1980s, is populated by a host of characters with patchwork identities: white, Puerto Rican, black, rich, poor. At the center of the tangled web is Puerto Rican-Irish Vidamia Farrell, daughter of upwardly mobile Elsa Santiago and Vietnam War vet Billy Farrell. Vidamia meets her father for the first time when she is 12 and discovers that she has two families: she lives with her strict mother and CPA stepfather in an affluent New York suburb, but she is powerfully drawn to her father's bohemian household on Manhattan's rough Lower East Side. Her father is a former jazz pianist whose career was cut short by the war, which cost him two fingers and his sanity. Vidamia is fascinated by his story and becomes fast friends with her stepsister Cookie, a dazzlingly blonde homegirl; when she is almost 17, she falls in love with Wyndell Ross, a black saxophonist. A multitude of secondary characters are fully developed: Elsa, Vidamia's mother, who struggles to leave the barrio behind; Fawn, Cookie's doomed poet sister; Maud, Billy's bar-owning Irish mother. The author's storytelling is unapologetically sentimental and rambling; his loving depiction of New York's Puerto Rican subculture reflects the full spectrum of city life. A brutal rape and a violent act of retaliation bring the novel to a sobering close, but Yunqu‚ (The Comeback, etc.) leaves his readers with a sense of hope and hard-won harmony.
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