Of Dead Poets and Their Society

“This is my first day of being dead . . . ,” reports 18-year-old Buzzy Digit, narrator of Diego Vazquez Jr.’s affecting debut novel, “Growing Through the Ugly.” The year is 1969, and although Buzzy is dead, his memory lives, speaking from the plane transporting his body from Vietnam to Texas. The novel’s risky premise disturbs less, though, than its narrator’s preoccupation with sex, an obsession seemingly ingenuous in its pubescent prurience, an obsession ultimately--eerily--believable. Buzzy’s memory--imagine Holden Caulfield’s without a sense of irony, Portnoy’s without the capacity for guilt--is horny.

The novel takes its title from one of Buzzy’s grandmother’s simple-hearted poems, which holds that the importance of butterflies has to do with their offspring growing through the ugly to fly away beautiful, and takes its power from the sad irony that Buzzy Digit dies too soon to achieve this metamorphosis.

Born Bernardino Soldano Dysyadachek Jr. to a World War II veteran father who deserts his family and to a Chicago-Polish mother who abandons her son to take up with a Chilean poet, Buzzy Digit comes of age in El Paso, Texas, under the care of his abuela, Nana Kika Soldano. Nana Kika tries to provide the moral and ethical center of Buzzy’s universe, but she cannot protect him from el Chonte, a man who sexually abuses children. Meanwhile, Buzzy, haunted by several earlier incestuous events, begins his career as a window-peeking, panty-stealing, mota-smoking, train-hopping Little League ballplayer, a likable carnal chameleon who views humanity through a lens constricted by adolescent lust.

All the borders in Buzzy’s world are shifting--age, sexual orientation, truth, morality, language, death.

At 12, he and a Little League buddy pick up some older girls and hang out at a hotel where President Kennedy is to sign the Chamizal Treaty, ceding land to Mexico after the river jumps the border. The group witnesses the Secret Service smuggling a “nurse” into the president’s room. Buzzy’s group is granted an audience, and the president, Buzzy reports, autographs the bra of the bustiest girl.

There is a chance that poetry can save Buzzy, a child too soon acquainted with the “infinite ache.” He apprentices himself to a purple-robed poetaster who stuns a group of Pearl beer-drinking vatos by quoting Neruda. Although some of Neruda’s themes inform the novel, and Buzzy persists in the only kind of grace he’s aware of, poetry arrives too little and too late: His draft number comes up.

Vazquez has an accurate eye for place, an ample heart for character, a flawless ear for the macaronic rhythms of border diction. Throughout the novel, however, he allows Buzzy to wax beyond his capabilities with language, resulting in the impenetrable imagery of adolescent poetry, a lyricism too lavish for its subject--lust--to bear and, too often, an uncontrolled dissolve into lamentation.

An enduring myth of border culture suggests that sorrow seeks release beyond mortality. When Malinche, the consort of Cortes, learned that he planned to take their son to Spain, she drowned the child, knowing that the soul of one who dies away from his homeland will find no rest. In some versions of the tale, this tragic figure becomes la Llorona, whose spirit wanders the Earth, still grieving. In this tradition, bereft of his body, Buzzy Digit mourns his exile.

Finding the language of a soul’s expression can be the most difficult of narrative tasks. Regardless of Buzzy’s youth and the limits of his preoccupations, he seems owed a share of dignity. By withholding from his character a means of expression adequate to his loss, the author shifts the reader’s feelings--sometimes with too variable a measure of success--away from what could have been love and sorrow, toward their distant, poor relation, pity. But perhaps this is the reason Buzzy Digit’s voice, long after it ceases, maintains its power to haunt.