E3W Literature | University of Texas

Manuel Muñoz
The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue
Algonquin Books, 2007
239 pages
$12.95

Reviewed by Pamela Mann

Manuel Muñoz’s The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue is a collection of interconnected short stories centered on a Mexican American town in the Central Valley of California. The stories occur in, or near, an unnamed town south of Fresno, and are anchored by Gold Street. Although not chronological, the stories follow the growth of the town and its inhabitants over many years. The poor, rural neighborhood transforms into a middle class suburb while the population changes very little. Mexican immigrant parents are replaced by their Mexican American children, who have grown up, married, left, returned and modernized the houses and streets for the next generation. What ties the characters and stories together is the sense of place, everything occurs around Gold Street under the watchful eyes of the neighbors. “The neighbors from across the street had come out, pretending to mind their own business, but this was Gold Street, where everything sounded familiar, even cars.”

Like his earlier collection, Zigzagger (2003), Muñoz’s Faith Healer of Olive Avenue deals with family relationships, loss and longing often filtered through characters struggling with their identity as gay men and members of a changing, but close-knit Mexican community. The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue opens and closes with the triplets, Carlos, Chris and Claudio, one of whom has died in a motorcycle accident in the first story, “Lindo y Querido.” The story introduces the unspoken secret that burdens many of the men and boys in the collection—their homosexuality. In “Lindo y Querido,” Connie (Concepción) must deal with the loss of her son, Isidro, who survived the motorcycle crash that killed one of triplets, only to die at home under his mother’s watchful eye. Midway through the collection, “Senor X” looks at Chris, a triplet just released from a correctional facility and back in the neighborhood trying to start again. Toward the end of the collection, “The Good Brother” revisits the triplets: a now adult Sebastián recalls the fight between his mother and the triplets’ mother sparked by the discovery of Sebastián’s adolescent sexual exploration with an unnamed triplet.

The collection is touchingly laced with melancholy, evoked by Muñoz’s use of descriptive language to create portraits of places and people. In “Señor X” he writes:
And so it was that I finally stepped into his house and saw how cramped it actually was. The linoleum worn down to black patches near the sink and the stove; the refrigerator so tiny it only reached my chest; the heavy gas stove crouching in the corner; the electric wiring looping cheap and dangerous, as in all the houses of the neighborhood; the sink and the baseboards tilting a little where the house must have been giving way on its foundation; on the table, a half loaf of bread with its wrapper tucked under, the plums still coated with the gray film of the field; a smell in the air like the creak of the boards, like mildew, like dust settled deep in the cracks, like kitchen grease.
Returning home to Gold Street is a common theme in The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. In, “Bring, Brang, Brung,” Martín, returns to the neighborhood from San Francisco, as a single father after his lover dies. The narrator of “Tell Him About Brother John,” is visiting from “over there” when Brother John tells the narrator why he dropped out of college and came back to Gold Street. “Ida y Vuelta” focuses on Roberto, one who stayed behind and how he handles the return of his lover Joaquín. These pieces suggest that it may be easier to be gay “over there,” away from Gold Street, but no one is quite able to stay away.

While grounded in the Mexican American experience, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue should appeal to all readers interested in short fiction and is highly recommended for students of Latino literature. The tight focus on the community around Gold Street and a number of recurring characters give the book cohesiveness that many interconnected short story collections lack. Although each of the stories in the collection is a successful stand-alone piece with its own voice, readers may be tempted to read the book as a whole, because the larger story of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue is so believable and engaging. Characters pass in and out of each other’s stories as neighbors pass in and out of each other’s lives, sometimes knowing too much, sometimes knowing nothing at all, but always watching and watching out for each other.