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Dark Blue Suit And Other Stories. . - Reviews - book review
Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998 by Lyall Bush
DARK BLUE SUIT AND OTHER STORIES by Peter Bacho. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. vii + 149 pages. $30 cloth; $16.95 paper.
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Over and over in Peter Bacho's Dark Blue Suit it is the writing--the sentences, the voice, the rhythm--that disappoints. Even reading casually, flipping pages, it's hard to find any natural lure of storytelling, any joy in words and phrases. The collection received a 1998 Governor's Writers Award for literary excellence in Washington state, but you can guess that the honor had more to do with its multicultural cachet than with its writerly prowess: over 12 threadbare stories, the collection retraces the childhood, adolescence and young adulthood of a Seattle-born Filipino named Buddy. But the details that ought to reveal this culture are nowhere to be found: the title story finds a pre-adolescent Buddy strolling with his dad into a hazily defined place full of Filipino working men, or "Pinoys," to observe the esteem in which the workers hold his father, a cannery foreman and the man in the sharp and creaseless suit of the title. But the attempts at cultural mapping are halfhearted; Buddy's interest in his dad seems more connected with the author's literary interest in the "mystery of men." And the symbolic suit? It marks its wearer as that literary figure, the divided man: it makes the father glamorous in his community, and it highlights his desire to reinvent himself American-style--in this case via the image of Humphrey Bogart.
These attempts at mythification--or de-mystification--remain just that, small Ozymandian pulses. A phrase like "dark blue suit" hovers, but then is never dug into, and eventually it's dropped. Here's another moment in which Buddy keeps an ear cocked, over his sister Stephie's talk, for another conversation: "Besides, Dad and Uncle Leo raised more interesting topics, like Mildred's telling Leo that Stephie was really his, and that, at the least, he should start paying support (including accordion lessons)." The sentence turns on the words, "Mildred's telling Leo," but I cannot imagine a less rewarding assonantal chain or a more ineloquent stutter of phrases and feints after.
The entrance into the social and psychological workings of poor Filipinos that the opening story promises goes unfulfilled too; the stories stick to familiar literary turf. There's the Vietnam story, "Rico," in which Buddy and his bad, cool friend of the title part ways first in school, which Rico shrugs off, and then over the Vietnam War, for which Rico is drafted. There's the ironic race story, "August 1968," in which Buddy loses another friend, Aaron, to the black consciousness movement of the 1960s. But the dialogue in both stories is deeply unpersuasive. In "Home," Rico returns from Vietnam, haunted (or "hunted" as Buddy says) by what seems the Hollywood version of the war: "the generals dropped acid, entered a trance, and spoke of lights shining at the ends of tunnels.... Somehow [Rico] survived the carnage, the bodies piled upon bodies piled upon lies." This writing pales in comparison to Michael Herr's hallucinatory Vietnam book, Dispatches, from which it draws its fire. As throughout Dark Blue Suit, the prose dulls what it borrows.
Inevitably, though Buddy spins his stories through other characters--through Rico, Aaron, his one love ("Stephie"), Uncle Leo--the meat of them comes around to Buddy's watery disappointment in their inability to stick by and understand him. Many stories end with Buddy casting his characters from paradise: he walks away from them--or, worse (one infers) they from him.
Which makes the final story's funeral setting oddly fitting. "A Family Gathering" opens with Buddy, divorced and now living in San Francisco, on his feet, at "a gathering of men that I love." "I walk along the edge of the neatly trimmed lawn," he begins, "on familiar ground," which is to say in a Filipino cemetery. Near his father's gravesite, watching his family straggle across the lawn he sees that "decades ago" these elder Pinoys "faced a hostile land and didn't even blink." That awkward sentence launches a chastening passage about the new, degreed Filipino immigrants who don't care about the past. But by Buddy's own evidence inter-generational knowledge isn't exactly easy to come by. Buddy's dad, for one, pops up in stories mostly to rehearse maxims about family and honor and duty to blood. It's no surprise, then, that at the gravesite, Buddy searches for words, only to find that "our bond ... was wordless."
Oh, priceless irony. If only this collection had honored that tradition, a reader may find himself thinking, with a silence of its own.
LYALL BUSH Seattle, Washington
COPYRIGHT 1998 Studies in Short Fiction
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