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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). Edgardo Vega Yunqué. Picador: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 0312424027. 816 pages.
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No matter how much you may fear asking your local librarian or book seller to find this book for you - quick, name that title in one breath! - you don't want to be responsible for Bill Bailey never coming home again, now do you? This is yet another giant of a book (a mere 789 pages), but yet again, we wouldn't encourage your eyestrain if it weren't utterly worth every elliptical, explosive page. Winner of the 2004 Latino Book Award, Bill Bailey is a story for every shade of color and culture that make up the ever-shifting ethnic stew known as America. This multi-family epic takes us from the hustling streets of present-day Manhattan's Lower East Side to the gummy jungles of war-ravaged Vietnam to the silent, stubborn cabins of the Civil War South to the long, terrible walk of the Cherokee Nation's "trail of tears" - then snaps back forward to join Puerto Rican homegirls singing the 1960s hit "Latin from Manhattan" as they take the Number 6 to Orchard Beach. And that, my friends, is just in the first couple of chapters. The heroine at the heart of this miraculous collective is precocious teenager Vidamía Farrell, half Puerto-Rican, half Irish, and half analyzed-to-death by her socially ambitious psychologist mother Elsa Santiago. Vidamía sets out to find the father she has never known, despite her mother's desperate determination to keep things that way until roughly the end of time. In Billy Farrell and his delightful second family, Vidamía discovers an entirely otherworldly side to her cultural identity. But despite the blissful satisfaction and sense of place she enjoys with the Farrell clan, one or two pressing questions just won't go away. Namely, why did her father, in 1968 a skinny-white-boy jazz pianist of such unnerving talent that he was courted by none other than Miles Davis, turn down an offer to become a member of the Miles Davis Quintet because he felt he "had" to serve in Vietnam? And why, still, so many years later, does the very sight of a piano make Billy break out in shuddering sweat? And what about that other mysterious musical genius from Elsa Santiago's estranged past-why is Vidamia forbidden access to her own maternal grandfather?
People magazine sings the praises of Yunqué's 'symphonic novel': "In an exceptional epic shaped by the jagged rhythms of jazz. . . you'll be humming 'Bill Bailey' long after the music stops." We agree, but add this reader's caveat (Yunqué doesn't sugarcoat so neither will we) there's a scene or two here that are among the harshest we've ever run across in any kind of reading. Still, the novel as a whole is among the richest, deepest, juiciest celebrations of the panoply of American Life that we've ever encountered anywhere in literature. Bill Bailey might not never be coming home again, but Yunqué's account of his troubled wanderings in search of The Dream is truly stunning in its sheer comprehensive blue-note history.
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