A campus novel with an incisive, self-contradictory woman narrator? Say less.
Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio came out late last month and it is, I’d venture to say, an updated blend of The Bell Jar meets The Catcher in the Rye, in a good way. Like both of those novels, the narrator’s titular protagonist, Catalina, is engaging with elite programming/schooling (in this case, she’s a senior at Harvard) while also kind of hating it. The disdain she feels is folded into familial pressures, class experiences, and her undocumented status, creating a veritable cocktail for a complicated, stormy coming-of-age story.
Catalina, the narrator, is wry and, at times, painfully self-aware. (“ I fear that sometimes everything I think and believe myself to feel about the world is just an amalgamation of passages from books I read as a kid or sound bites from opinions my grandfather expressed in 2004,” she writes. Or, “The vernacular of small creatures is dreaming of vengeance. I remember every animal I’ve seen as roadkill, every single one.”)
There are two main thrusts to the story: one, Catalina’s interest in a boy named Nathaniel who is studying anthropology, specializing, painfully, in Andean cultures; the other is around her and her grandparents’ undocumented status. In one moment, Catalina is throwing up at a party; in the next, she’s brainstorming ways to shield her grandfather from deportation, vexed over keeping her own undocumented status mostly a secret.
It’s easy to fall into the voice of Catalina, the narrator. She leads you through her internal monologue, her various feelings about organized religion, her home country of Ecuador, her relationships with her grandparents, and her desperate desire to fall in love with such cracking energy that you hardly register you’re being taken on a ride at all. She’s disaffected; she’s hopelessly hopeful — the contradictions fit into one another in the irrationally logical way feelings work in real life. And they come at just as fast of a clip.
That said, I’m a real sucker for pacing, and there were two moments in this novel that I wish had been stretched out a bit more; one being Catalina’s decision to take her grandfather’s immigration case public, the other being the ending, which is sudden (in a truly Salinger/Plath way, to be fair).
There is an argument, a very good one, that desperate people do desperate things. This accounts for a lot of human behavior! But, in a novel, readers need to see the psychology behind apparently irrational decisions. When Catalina agrees to eschew her family’s privacy for their protection, the reader is left out of the decision. In fact, no one in the know appears overly surprised about what she’s doing, not even the celebrity director she recruits to help her. After spending so many pages deeply inside Catalina’s psyche, I found myself wanting to have just as much access to her complicated feelings in that moment as I did about, say, asking a cute boy she saw on the street to tie her shoes.
It’s a blip, albeit one that can be mostly overlooked for the sake of soaking in Catalina’s ongoing narration about the people and places around her.
A short story recommendation (yes, from the syllabus files):
Last fall, I taught “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” a 2019 story by Jamil Jan Kochai, a story whose narrator shares with Catalina a self-serious sense of humor, as well as the indefatigable tension between personal needs and familial needs. I revisited this story this week as I’m updating my reading lists, and if you haven’t read it, hop quickly. It’s searing and immersive; two things I think all short stories should be
It’s a quick one this week, folks, but there is always more to come. Talk Vomit submissions remain open; plans for paid subscriber benefits continue.
xoxo
Monica