Flaubert’s Heir: A Review of Sleep Decades by Israel Bonilla

Israel Bonilla’s debut short story collection, Sleep Decades, is a feverish example of erudite style. Many of the stories here take place in Guadalajara, other times we are in California, but always with a poetic efflorescent prose that draws us into each story with elaborate streams of thought and without heavy plotting. Bonilla doesn’t shy from language deep with meaning, even if it means that sometimes the stories plod along the page like a weary traveler. You can sense his affinity with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf with his deft control of his expansive resources. In the most unusual story in the collection, “Confessions of an American Marihuana User,” he dons his Postmodernist hat and lets the narrator address the reader directly:

Yet to dive immediately into the topic would be a blunder. The background of a life is needed. Drugs, in all their varieties, shuffle the sceneries of memory with the technique of a cardsharp. It is difficult, almost impossible, to account for the erratic behaviors that emerge if this is brushed aside. Count on it that the happy drunk has in him a robust source of joy, bought at a cheap price when young! Ponder the fact that the raging refer-freak has in him a wasteland, panhandled in successive tragedies!

Critic James Wood once said that Flaubert is the father of aestheticism; Bonilla is carrying the torch quite well today.

It’s not uncommon for writers to start their careers off with short stories, waiting for the call-up to the big leagues of the novel. (Carver never got around to it.) This also makes short story writing the domain of the dilettante—lacking the stamina and discipline to complete a novel, they also write what they think a New York Times critic would want to see. Not so with Bonilla, he’s brimming with confidence in these stories, having inherited Beckett’s fastidiousness, and he brings it out in gale force prose. In the story “Alive and Well,” the narrator tells us of his Aunt Carmen, a woman who never married, who took in her lazy brother and fed him and gave him money.

Such was her altruism that I felt cynical trying to pinpoint its limits (a disreputable exercise in any context, some may say, although one that I find useful when it comes to identifying hypocrisy, as was the case with Veronica, who seldom failed to preach the doctrine of love, even if she herself could bestow it only after careful calculations not unlike those of a stockbroker, or as was the case with Uncle Enrique, why not say it, who liked to think of himself a magnanimous brother, husband, and father, all three roles at which he failed to the point of not being worthy of the two most condescending words of our language: nice try). But, as I said, no one like Uncle Enrique.

Authors writing this well almost always have too many eggs in their lengthy-sentence pudding, and Bonilla’s no exception here. However, none of his sentences outstay their welcome.

Bonilla’s adept at changing voice when it’s needed. In Cheever’s stories, no matter who the character is, they always have that suburban WASPy voice that keeps you aware that you are in a Cheever story. Here in “Basement Blues,” we have a janitor who sings to his cleaning implements: “But I saw a lady on the sidewalk singin’ to ‘er plants. She was shinin’. I bet she had young ‘uns that forgot they ever had a gramma. What’s the difference ‘tween a plant ‘n some tools, really?” In yet another story, our narrator says, “I am an unremarkable man. The limit of my physical and intellectual endowment is quite clear. My attention span is rather lacking; it is equipped to deal with breezy conversations and fifteen-minute readings.” Before they began their infamous feud, Ford Madox Ford said Hemingway wrote like an angel. Papa certainly wrote well, but angelic writing it was not. Angelic is what we see in these bouquets of erudition and mannered idiosyncrasies from Bonilla. Sure, those Hemingwayesque short, declarative sentences can move a story along, but they can also be dull as a dirty mirror. Bonilla’s sentences keep a shine on, alternating between sublime and ridiculous, and between serious and comic.

Sleep Decades is exuberant without bouncing off the walls, and Bonilla throws highbrow cultivation around himself like hoops. He skillfully takes us along on the long-distance haul of meaning, even if the ride gets a little purple at times. Sometimes his sentences rise off the page and wave their lives right before our eyes, sometimes they act like they suffer from a rare neurological disorder. This short story collection is his first book—I’d love to see him tackle a novel.