Ernesto Quiñonez: Bodega Dreams

  THE SPORADIC WAR against poverty has seen some strange foot soldiers: dilettantes, academics, black paramilitaries, and the occasional politician. In the Sixties and early Seventies, activists in Spanish Harlem worked to counter urban blight by creating affordable housing. Yet the ones leading this effort were not clergy or politicians but street thugs and drug lords. Using their keen understanding of their neighborhoods and the help of local lawyers, such outlaws renovated old buildings and rented the apartments to families at a discount. In his powerful debut novel Bodega Dreams, 34-year-old Ernesto Quiñonez draws on this lost slice of Big Apple history to tell a reimagined Gatsby story, one in which his Gatsby actually believes in something.

Unlike many of his neighborhood friends, Chino has been trying to stay on the straight and narrow. But the closer he gets to success, the more Chino is caught between the life he's beginning with his Pentecostal wife Blanca and the one he's leaving behind with his best friend, Sapo, a small-time drug dealer with a vicious temper. Even though he doesn't approve of Sapo's behavior, Chino remembers how this ally had once protected him. Now, whenever Sapo needs a place to stash dope, he can drop by Chino's. When Sapo's boss, Willie Bodega, is looking for a good man, Chino agrees to come forward.

In a scene that treads the border of overstatement, Bodega gives Chino a long speech about how he needs an ambitious young man to be the face of respectability for his new business of renovating buildings. In return for his services, Chino will get a two-bedroom apartment at a great discount (an offer that could corrupt Cardinal O'Connor himself). With a bit of prying, Chino discovers that Bodega's designs aren't purely philanthropic: He's performing this community service to win back a Latin beauty named Vera (read: Daisy), whom Bodega lost 20 years ago when he went to prison. That woman also happens to be Blanca's aunt, and Bodega knows Chino can help him get to her.

Once Quiñonez sets this plot in motion, it rolls along smoothly--at times too smoothly. While Fitzgerald revealed the emptiness of Gatsby's love for Daisy, Quiñonez never fully questions Bodega's own affections. As a result, Bodega and Vera's affair feels like a film plot with noirish dialog, conveniently dropped into a more naturalistic novel. More compelling are the tangled loyalties Quiñonez reveals between Chino and Sapo, and Chino and Blanca.

Quiñonez's relationship to Spanish Harlem, where he has lived since childhood, is no doubt a similarly complicated one, and he renders the rough language and drama of the neighborhood with a sympathetic pen. In the end, what is most stirring about this book is its examination of the impulse to fix what is broken--be it a neighborhood or a fate-damned affair.