FICTION

WELCOME TO THE OASIS AND OTHER STORIES by Virgil Suarez (Arte Publico Press: $9.50 paper; 124 pp.) A Cuban immigrant who arrived on the Mariel boat-lift gets a job painting a seedy Los Angeles apartment building. Lonely, he can’t help being drawn into the suspicious, violent world of the manager and tenants. A youth whose father is a gambler wishes he could break free of the family, as his older brother did. Another youth, who wants to be a lifeguard, smolders with resentment at having to work on his father’s ice-cream truck. Yet another youth, set adrift by his parents’ divorce, has a brief love affair with an Anglo girl. Three college students descend on New Orleans for an LSD-twisted night.

In this collection of six stories by Cuban-born Virgil Suarez, who attended Cal State Long Beach, the common inheritance of young Latinos in America is alienation. This is doubly true of the house painter--the hero of the longest and most interesting story--who was a fugitive in Cuba before the boat-lift. Yet even the native-born characters chafe against traditional ways. Caught between cultures, they depend heavily--too heavily--on family. Intact families smother them; broken families leave them rootless.

Suarez writes in a rough-and-ready style that fits his apparent subject matter: fistfights, gunshots, sudden sex, outbursts of rage that fail to end unhappy relationships. He has an eye for detail and a gift for compression. The real subject of these stories, however, isn’t crude at all; it’s so evanescent that his characters grope to define it and Suarez, still lacking a full set of fictional tools, must grope for a form to suggest its absence: a way out.