There’s a quiet moment in Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot – one of the more ambitious stories in Daniel Alarcón’s memorable new collection – when Hank, who is splitting up with his boyfriend, ponders that: “The place you are born is simply the first place you flee.”
Which is a neat way to describe how so many of Alarcón’s characters operate in The King Is Always Above The People. Time and time again, young men are forced to leave home, learning something about themselves, freedom and the ties of family. They do so in beautifully intimate ways that surely reflect this Peruvian-American’s experience producing the Radio Ambulantepodcast, a kind of This American Life for the Spanish-speaking world; in similar ways the stories here take on huge issues such as migration, isolation, poverty and war through personal, lived experience rather than using broad brushstrokes.
What’s equally impressive is that although the tone is even throughout, the medium is refreshingly varied. There aren’t 10 equally paced stories here told via the third person; The Thousands is just a few pages long yet painstakingly explores how a migrant community – described in the plural “we” – builds from nothing more than “wire and aluminium, quilts and driftwood, plastic tarps and rubber tyres”. The government doesn’t know what to do with the makeshift city, because it is not allowed to bulldoze homes. So little by little, they are allowed to tell their story. And it’s a story of hope.
That Alarcón is able to make The Thousands soar in such a short space of time is genuinely remarkable. The trick is repeated – over just seven pages and this time in the subjunctive – in the very next story, The Ballad of Rocky Rontal. The entire sweep of a tragic life is depicted as a child abused at home becomes a murderous gang member, and it’s so convincing that it’s not a surprise to find that the roots of this tale are in a journalistic piece Alarcón wrote on Rontal. But in stripping back the detail, Alarcón finds a poetic sadness in the depressing inevitability.
And when Alarcón does give himself more breathing space, in The Auroras, he displays the kind of simple but hugely effective – and affecting – writing that won this collection a National Book award longlisting in America last year. Once again it’s the tale of a man out of his element in an unnamed port city “just as he hoped he’d be”. He’s walked away from his family after the nostalgic stories they tell themselves can no longer overcome their humdrum reality, but after the luck, the happiness, the sex dissipates in his new city, it’s replaced by regret and a new – rather amusing – predicament.
Alarcón balances all these elements beautifully and empathetically, without ever offering an excuse for his protagonist’s middle-aged ache. As he writes in another story, the world is “disappointingly familiar”. Alarcón, here, makes this familiarity a virtue and a pleasure.
