A New York Times 2001 Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001, American Son presents a grim view of immigrant status and violence in Southern California in the 1990s. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of the Sullivan brothers, sons of a long-gone American father and a devoted Filipina mother. The story is narrated by the younger son, Gabe, who is caught between his desire to please his mother, Ika, and the pull of his rebellious older brother, Tomas. Ika finds herself out of her depth in American society and helpless to control her sons’ increasingly violent behavior.

The novel is about the fluidity of racial affiliation in California, and the insidiousness of this category: Tomas, who trains attack dogs to sell to Hollywood celebrities, chooses to pose as a Mexican, wearing a gold cross and flaunting a huge Virgin of Guadalupe tattoo. Ika’s brown skin and accented English determine the way she is treated by shopkeepers and other school mothers. Gabe, the “good” son who tries to help his mother, can pass for white. All the characters undergo a personal itinerary of adaptation that arises from their sense of themselves as outsiders in society, and their determination to carve their place in it.

Tomas finds release in increasing brutality, drug use, and abuse of his family. The mother places her hope in her younger son, and in his staying in school and doing well. Gabe runs away to escape his brother’s fury and to find a racially neutral place for himself. His encounter with a tow-truck driver who mistakes him for a white boy makes him aware of the dangerous consequences of specific affiliations. When they meet up with his mother, who comes to take him home, Gabe tells the driver that she is the maid. This cruel disowning of his mother reflects the boy’s desperate attempt to detach himself from the markers of difference.

Gabe returns home to dire consequences. In reparation for having stolen his brother’s car and selling his favorite dog, he must now serve as Tomas’s accomplice in theft, drug dealing, and physical attacks. Though the boy’s body initially rejects these acts—he throws up every time he accompanies his brother on his forays—Gabe actively participates in the beating of Ben Feinstein in revenge for Ika’s humiliation by Ben’s mother. Roley manages to convey the boy’s growing bitterness and disillusionment through an increasingly unemotional prose. Gabe’s voice, tentative and insecure at first, acquires decision and a steely edge to it by the end of the novel.

The boys’ relationship with their mother is curiously ambivalent. They love her and are fiercely protective of her, but they also abhor the image she projects of foreignness and a failure to assimilate. Her helplessness, deference toward white Americans, and inability to stand up for herself make them despise her. Gabe remains unaware of the contradiction inherent in his violent defense of her at the end: to “save” his mother, he condemns himself, an act that will almost certainly destroy her.

Brian Ascalon Roley

Ika’s story is that of the immigrant’s defeat—she works at two jobs to make ends meet, cannot pay for car insurance, and understands she has lost her sons to an American world that remains alien to her. Gabe’s narrative alternates with letters from his uncle Betino to Ika. As Betino suggests solutions to the boys’ problems, urging her to enroll them in strict Catholic schools, he stresses his sister’s inability to deal with her sons, who are becoming an embarrassment to the family name.

In a manner of speaking, Ika is caught between two narratives—her brother’s letters, which outline a life of tradition and privilege that she has rejected in favor of her American dream, and her son’s bildungsroman, which chronicles his initiation into a world of violence and consequent separation from her. Too American to return to the Philippines and too obviously a foreigner in the United States, Ika no longer belongs anywhere. This liminal position is one occupied by all the characters in this powerful and painful account of immigrants and biracial children trying to survive in America.

Sources
Roley, Brian Ascalon. American Son. New York: Norton, 2001.
———. American Son: A Novel.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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