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Review: The Barbarian Nurseries.

Hector Tobar. The Barbarian Nurseries. NY: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011.
ISBN: 9780374108991 0374108994

Michael Sedano

Héctor Tobar has taken the possible and made it impossible.

Is it possible to add another title to the wondrous list of Los Angeles novels?

Absolutely. In fact, name your favorite LA novel, from Chandler to De Lillo to Yxta Maya Murray, and add Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries to the top of the list.

Is it possible to find a better Los Angeles novel?

No. The Barbarian Nurseries stands alone as the quintessential cultural portrait of early twenty-first century Los Angeles.

In the novel’s three chapters—three books in one—Tobar begins with an ethnically mixed upwardly mobile family, a Mexican-American software engineer and a down East Anglo mother, caught in their own acquisitional excess and benign neglect of the hired help. The family implodes, stranding the Mexicana maid with two sheltered boys and a hazy notion of where to find the boys’ grandfather.

The final chapter jails the maid for fanciful Anglo-perceived crimes and sends her through the dual processes of a criminal trial and impending deportation.

Tobar takes pains to keep his characters at arm’s length so a reader doesn’t like anyone too much nor despise anyone irrationally.

Araceli, the maid, he paints as a crusty tipa, a Bellas Artes student who bottles her creativity behind pursed lips and curtness. Up until now, life’s greatest slap in the face was getting a scholarship to the instituto but getting no money for brushes and paints. She lives as an example of a character who may die with one thousand masterpieces hanging only from her mind.

Speaking of allusions, stay alert for that Chinese chalk. In preparation, read Olga Garcia’s poem “Sonia on Hope Street.” The poem echoes in one’s memory as Maureen diligently mops away the invisible knowledge locked away in jail with Araceli.

The Torres-Thompson family takes the cake. Actually, several, and all designer-made concoctions. He’s at a career dead-end and she’s stuck at home with two boys and a new-born daughter. We meet Scott sweating and cussing up a storm because his darned lawnmower refuses to cut the lawn as well as it performed for Pepe. Both Pepe, and Maureen’s nanny Guadalupe, had to go, to get expenses under control.

Although Tobar focuses the novel on the pendejadas of Scott, Maureen, and Araceli, he manages to draw the social milieu with broad strokes, as needed using a fine tip to draw out some fine detail from the jumbled landscape that stretches from the Anglo bastions of Orange County to the bus stops of H.P.

There’s the racist ideologue who takes up the cudgel in Tobar’s portrait of thought-absent obsession that sees only “ill” in “immigrant” then stands dumbfounded when her preferred “Just Us” shapes itself to reflect Justice, because bittersweet endings are better than sad ones, and because that’s how The System works. Tobar’s making up only some of this.

There’s the L.A. mayor who talks himself into being undecided whether to choose wishy or washy when it comes to taking a strong pro-comunidad position. In contrast, there’s the Mexican Consul in Santa Ana who is as bumbling a fool as the mayor is a cipher. Much as Tobar dislikes that character, the author gives a final glimpse of the empty man desolate

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