Rosario Ferré
Eccentric Neighborhoods
New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998. Pp. 340. US $24.00
Reviewed by George R. McMurray

Rosario Ferré is one of Puerto Rico’s two most widely acclaimed living writers, the other being Luis Rafael Sánchez. Whereas Sánchez writes in a postmodernist vein, Ferré, especially in her most recent novels, is more traditional in her approach to fiction. She first wrote exclusively in Spanish, establishing her reputation as a short story writer, novelist, and playwright. Her last two novels, how­ever, have been written in English. The first of these, The House on the Lagoon (1995), like Eccentric Neighborhoods, is the saga of Puerto Rican families, with allusions to Ferré’s feminist struggle against the machismo prevalent in Latin Amer­ica.

Eccentric Neighborhoods portrays two families, the Rivas de Santillanas (traditional landed gentry), and the Vernets (nouveau riche industrialists). Thus, we witness the gradual decline of the island’s plantation aristocracy and the rapid rise of the more recent immigrants who seek their fortunes in business enterprises and tend to favor American culture and statehood for Puerto Rico. Santiago (Chaguito) Vernet, who immigrated to Puerto Rico from Cuba early in the twentieth century, emerges as one of the dynamic molders of the new Puerto Rico when he, with his four sons, founds a group of cement and iron industries. Chaguito’s wife Adela, a former school teacher, also stands out as a major player, instilling in her household the work ethic, a desire for education, and a love of music.

The two families are united by the marriage of Aurelio Vernet, Chaguito’s son, and Clarissa Rivas de Santillana. Their daughter Elvira, the principal narrator, first tells of her mother’s branch of the family, emphasizing her grandpar­ents’ leisurely, luxurious life on their sugar plantation, Emajaguas, near the city of La Concordia, and the diverse fates of her four aunts. Elvira also recalls an incident from her childhood when she and her mother were driven by their chauffeur from Concordia to Emajaguas and their car became stuck in a stream. After her mother waved a dollar bill to nearby peasants, who were perspiring under a blazing sun, the latter hitched their oxen to the car and pulled it out of the water. Elvira’s mother then slid the dollar through the crack of the rolled-down window, an image of separation, and the car drove away at top speed.

Determined not to repeat her frustrated mother’s error of foregoing a career for marriage and children, Elvira nevertheless attempts to escape the “hell” of her home life-created by her overly possessive mother-by marrying a man she does not love. But her husband turns out to be exactly the type of husband she had vowed to avoid, that is, an overbearing, tradition-bound macho whom she divorces after bearing two children. Like Ferré, Elvira eventually obtains a doc­torate in literature and gains independence by entering the teaching profession. Meanwhile her father Aurelio, a charismatic millionaire, enters politics against the wishes of his wife and eventually wins the race for governor of Puerto Rico. (Ferré’s father also became governor of the island.)

Ferré manages to entwine the personal lives of her characters, who are highly symbolic of forces colliding in Puerto Rico, with the twentieth-century history of the island, creating something akin to an epic of national identity. The contrasts between the ambitious, materialistic Vernets and the dreamy, sensitive Rivas de Santillanas serve to outline the panorama of a society undergoing rapid industrialization, often against the will of the more conservative elements. But the political and social aspects of this saga frequently take a back seat to the daily struggles of the myriad of cast members, whose foibles, disputes, and love affairs never lose our attention.

In the second part of her narrative, Elvira focuses on the Vernets, in ways emblematic of the changes occurring in Puerto Rico. Her aunt Celia is one of many examples. Wishing to elude the stifling atmosphere endured by other women in the novel, Celia decides against the will of her father Chaguito, an ar­dent freemason, to study in Chicago to become a nun. She finally persuades Chaguito to accompany her there and, after taking her vows, spends many years working in poverty-stricken parts of the U.S. Then, at the request of her bishop, she returns to Puerto Rico to persuade her wealthy family-now almost all free­masons-to contribute funds for the foundation of a Catholic university in Puerto Rico. The family’s generous contributions to the project demonstrate the underlying strengh of Catholicism even among those Puerto Ricans who claim to reject it in the name of progress.

As suggested above, Elvira’s stream of memories in some respects resembles a rambling, shapeless memoir. Ultimately, however, due to its epic proportions, poetic descriptions of setting, and insightfully drawn characters, it emerges as a richly textured work of fiction.

Ferré has wisely prefaced her tale with family trees of both the Rivas de San­tillanas and the Vernets, without which the reader could surrender to confusion. With its abundance of characters and family generations, Eccentric Neighborhoods bears comparison with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. But unlike the Colombian Nobel laureate, who delighted millions of devotees with flights of fantasy, Ferré captures her readers with a narrative planted on solid ground throughout, thus illustrating the more realistic trend scholars have detected in late twentieth-century Spanish-American fiction. Many of her readers will hope to meet her again soon.