Introducing Special Guest Manuel Muñoz
One exquisite aspect—there are many—of Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, the August California Book Club selection, is the care with which the novelist develops each character, including their backstory. The unfolding of their personalities occurs not only according to a present-day narrative but also through the deployment of telling details, lush metaphors, and reveals of what haunts them, and therefore what animates them.
In the novel, a local boy, Alejo, sees Estrella, the 13-year-old protagonist, and Viramontes describes the encounter like this: “Alejo did not really see Estrella’s face, her pierced but bare earlobes which were long and oval. Did not see the deep pock scar above her eyebrow from a bout of measles or the way her eyes had green specks like her father’s. What he saw was the woman who swam in the magnetic presence of the full moon, a woman named Star.” Viramontes presents highly particular descriptions, what we need, as outsiders to their relationship, to picture the drama between these two young people, but she recognizes, too, the nature of young love—its blindness—and the mysteriousness of living, upon which spiritual belief, an important theme in this book, depends.
While Estrella’s relationship to Alejo hinges on a romantic atmosphere heightened by metaphor, even characters who might initially seem outside the orbit of the teenagers’ feelings are sketched with exceptional care and realism. Perfecto, a 73-year-old man, has become a kind of father figure to his younger girlfriend’s children, including Estrella, after their father abandoned their mother. Estrella resents Perfecto, and through her eyes, we might too.
But Perfecto’s story, we learn, is a sorrowful one. He and his wife, Mercedes, had lost their firstborn baby shortly after its birth. “Only a baby’s blanket was left.… But no one believed him when he claimed that the sweet-sour baby smell still clung to the blanket. He could not find words or colors to describe the smells. He could only describe what the blanket smelled like: citrus and mint, rosewater, sometimes cloves.” Viramontes wisely recognizes that the evocation of scent does more to stir the reader than an explicit, maudlin recitation of his abstract feelings associated with the dead baby’s blanket. Mercedes develops cancer after bearing more children, and still, Perfecto yearns for the child. The sensuality of his sorrow and regret and longing makes those emotions palpable and brings us close to him, even as he may lack the language to capture the enormity of his feelings. We come to empathize as much with him as we do with Estrella and Alejo.
It’s a rare gift to be able to make characters’ lives tangible, to convince readers of their embodied realities and to use surface detail to reveal their inner lives. We are pleased to welcome Manuel Muñoz, also an author with this gift, as a special guest for Thursday night’s gathering of the California Book Club. Muñoz’s most recent book, The Consequences, is his third short story collection. With similar ambitions, both Muñoz and Viramontes write about farmworkers and labor. They attend not only to the external details of that work but also to what these specifics reveal about a character’s emotional reality and relationship to the community.
Take, for instance, Muñoz’s description of a character’s dress in his suspenseful 2011 novel, What You See in the Dark. Attending only to the surface, he might have noted, simply, it was a sparkly silver dress. Instead, he writes, “The boots don’t match the dress, but it’s too dark for anyone else to really care. All eyes are on the gorgeous satin, the way it catches what little light there is, the arrow detailing beginning at her shoulder and descending, circling each breast, the silver lacing deep inside the fringe, which sparkles to attention when she adjusts the microphone.” We are absorbed into the audience’s pleasure, the performer’s desire to delight, and the atmosphere of excitement.
Muñoz’s sensitivity to visual, physical description is matched by his startling attention to a character’s emotional life, an attention similar to what Viramontes bestows on Estrella, Perfecto, Alejo, and other characters in Under the Feet of Jesus. In “Susto,” a story in The Consequences, we come across another lovely passage, a metaphor of the sort that recurs throughout Viramontes’s novel, with its cognizance of the natural world, too. “His loneliness struck him like a rattler lurking in the vines, swift and vicious, a small and hidden thing that he bypassed daily, unaware.”
Muñoz is a dedicated chronicler of Central Valley stories. He may start with place, but he develops dazzling fellow feeling—humanity pulsing through the thoughtful articulation of ordinary lives—for his characters. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He was awarded the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, among other honors. Viramontes was his mentor when he earned his master of fine arts in creative writing from Cornell University, where she teaches.
Perhaps it’s dangerous to use the word authentic—authentic to whom? But it’s hard to avoid it here. Both of these supremely talented authors write an authentic California, peopled with characters who feel achingly alive. On Thursday, don’t miss the pleasure of listening to them in conversation.•
Join us on August 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Viramontes will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Muñoz to discuss Under the Feet of Jesus. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
FAITH AND KINDNESS
Read CBC host John Freeman’s essay about Under the Feet of Jesus and the questions it asks about the spirit. —Alta
“BOOKTAIL”
Mix Lindsay Merbaum’s original, refreshing cocktail for Viramontes’s novel. —Alta
SELLING FRUIT
Read an investigative essay by prior CBC author Jaime Cortez (Gordo) about roadside vendors. —Alta
WHY I WRITE
In a beautiful piece, Viramontes shares that she writes because “writing has been the only way I know how to pray.” —Alta
INVENTIVE FICTION
Kieran Press-Reynolds reviews a short story collection about Gen Z experiences, My First Book, by Honor Levy. —Alta
LITERARY COMMUNITY
Bay Area poets Tongo Eisen-Martin and Tess Taylor have been named 2024 Poet Laureate Fellows. Each received $50,000 to fund literary projects in their communities. —San Francisco Chronicle
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