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Drift: A Novel, by Manuel Luis Martinez
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An explosive, fierce, and lyrical novel, set in the barrios of San Antonio and Los Angeles, from an electrifying new voice in American fiction
At sixteen, Robert Lomos has lost his family. His father, a Latin jazz musician, has left San Antonio for life on the road as a cool-hand playboy. His mother, shattered by a complete emotional and psychological breakdown, has moved to Los Angeles and taken Robert's little brother with her. Only his iron-willed grandmother, worn down by years of hard work, is left. But Robert's got a plan: Duck trouble, save his money, and head to California to put the family back together. Trouble is, no one believes a delinquent Mexican American kid has a chance—least of all, Robert himself.
Wrenching and wise, Drift by Manuel Luis Martinez gives an unflinching vision of the menace of adolescence, the hard edge of physical labor, and the debts we owe to family.
- Sales Rank: #887330 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-01-06
- Released on: 2015-01-06
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Martinez's impressive second novel (after Crossing) gives us the world through the eyes of 16-year-old Mexican-American Robert Lomos, part tough-talking cynic, part sensitive older brother and son who is forced to learn more than he wants to about adult responsibilities when his mother has a mental breakdown. Robert's father, a jazz musician, abandoned his family two years before; his mother became unstable after his desertion and left San Antonio, Tex., to live with a sister in Los Angeles, taking Robert's three-year-old brother with her. Robert now lives with his no-nonsense grandmother, who sends him to the evangelical Sunnydale Christian Academy when he gets kicked out of public school for acting out. Robert is no angel-favorite activities include fighting, getting high and cruising for girls-but he longs to reunite his family. The jobs available to him, mainly busboy positions, are arduous and low paying, but he toughs it out until he has the money to get to Los Angeles (and succinctly sums up what many restaurant employees think of customers: "Watching them eat is enough to turn you against humanity"). He is hardly welcomed in L.A. with open arms, however. His aunt, Naomi, is hostile and suspicious, fearing that he'll upset the family's fragile equilibrium. Robert's efforts to help his brother, Antony, in school go awry, and he's once again getting into fights. Above all, his mother is more fragile than he imagined, and his attempt at a gallant rescue does not work out as he'd hoped. The story flags somewhat when he returns to San Antonio and a construction job, but Robert's biting, assured voice makes the book a standout.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Like all teenage narrators, Robert is very bright and precociously literate. According to him, he has read and absorbed The Sound and the Fury, East of Eden, and Kurt Vonnegut. Despite Robert not always being a believable character, his journey to make peace with his family and himself is heartbreakingly realistic. His father has left the family, and his mother has suffered a breakdown and taken Robert's little brother to live with her and her sister in California. Robert is left in San Antonio with his ulcer, failing grades, and grandmother. Robert believes he can grow up fast enough to put his family back together. Along the way, Robert gets in a fight, resulting in several broken teeth. This sparks the first of many allusions to vampires, never fully explained or explored. This first novel is awkward in places, but there are passages of depth and sensitivity. The characters, almost all working poor, are treated with a dignity and respect not always seen in fiction. Marta Segal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Manuel Luis Martinez takes us into a world that exists all over this country but is rarely portrayed so deeply--the decidedly unmagical realm of struggling Mexican Americans. In Drift, he delivers the trials of his young hero with honesty and passion and some of the best writing about work I've ever read.” ―Stewart O'Nan, author of Wish You Were Here
“Forget the sociology for a minute, Drift's great achievment is the dear and moving portrayal of a grandmother and grandson who love each other profoundly. Such affection is just about the hardest art to pull off, but Manuel Luis Martinez makes it seem easy.” ―Victor LaValle, author of Slapboxing with Jesus and The Ecstatic
“Drift is the searing tale of a teenage boy torn apart by his longing for his broken family and the demands of his coming adulthood. The book is a sustained and beautiful triumph of voice -- a voice that cries out in every line with anguish, anger, and love.” ―Jonathan Ames, author of The Extra Man
“This novel is necessary. Manuel Luis Martinez takes us into a world that exists all over this country but is rarely portrayed so deeply--the decidedly unmagical world of struggling Mexican-Americans. In Drift, he delivers the trials of his young hero with honesty and passion and some of the best writing about work I've ever read.” ―Stewart O'Nan, author of A Prayer for the Dying
“A comical, lyrical, and urgent force of a novel. No matter how lost, abandoned, or unloved life makes us feel, Drift leaves us seeing the glass half full.” ―Ernesto Quinonez, author of Bodega Dreams
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Sick of it all
By The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers
DRIFT is the Robert Lomos' story as he travels through the journey that some of us refer to as "becoming a man." The product of a marriage that didn't last, Robert had to grow up when he should have been thinking of little kid stuff: carnivals instead of caring for his baby brother; Little League instead of worrying about his father's infidelity; homecoming instead of witnessing his mother's mental breakdown. Robert has sees his life take a downward spiral when his aunt takes his mother from San Antonio to Los Angeles, to aid her in her convalescence, and insists he stay behind.
Robert lives with his Grams now at age seventeen, and his routine of partying hard, fighting, and cutting school has her at wit's end. So, she enrolls him in a private Christian school, where she believes he will be saved from the trouble that looms in his path. However, Robert ends up in even more scuffs and in even more bad situations than when he attended public school. Robert is tired of his ulcer causing him physical pain, and his mother and brother's absence causing him emotional pain. He decides to get a job, go to Los Angeles and try to convince them that he is now a man, a changed soul who is there to be their saving grace.
Manuel Martinez has carefully constructed his protagonist's voice. A strong, resonant narrator, Robert's spirit breathes new life into the first-person format of the novel. You could see Robert as clearly as if he were standing next to you, hear his voice as if he were whispering in your ear, and feel the heartache he feels, as if it were your own tribulation. A commendable novel, DRIFT foreshadows of more great things to come from Martinez.
Reviewed by CandaceK
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Book about �at risk� teen is a sure thing
By Lorenzo Tijerina
Trouble hunts some people down, while others seem to effortlessly avoid its camouflaged clutches. And still others charge headfirst into its clumsy, but firm grip.
Robert Lomos, the 16-year-old protagonist of Manuel Luis Martinez's latest offering, "Drift," wears his pain proudly all over his body. For him, trouble serves as his only reliable companion, besides his aged and ever working Grams.
Abandoned by his rambling father, a womanizing and party-hungry Tejano musician, circumstances forced Robert to quickly grow up and become the man of the house, caring for his innocent and perceptive little brother and his frail and mentally anguished mother.
But the stress from the daily challenges of a broken home quickly overwhelmed his mother and she, too, leaves Robert, taking his little brother with her to California where her overbearing sister wrapped her in a protective cocoon.
Written in the first person, the free-flowing, steam-of-consciousness-driven novel opens at Sunnydale Christian Academy in the barely fictionalized version of San Antonio where Robert lives now with his grandmother.
Sunnydale represents a last ditch effort by Grams to keep Robert, who has been kicked out of two school districts in just as many years, from becoming a "burro" like her.
Although the school is strict and even degrading - making the students raise a flag to go to the bathroom - Robert plays along so he can realize an abstract plan to follow his mother to the Promise Land of Orange County.
Although it has its share of bumps and dips, the narration develops much more smoothly than Robert's scheme, which seems inevitably doomed by the boy's own self-destructive notions. These notions pull and push the troubled youth, like a deceptively calm river, towards rocks, rapids, and a great, final fall, while his bruised and battered body drifts along for the ride.
Painful and frustrating, Robert's journey towards the verge of either oblivion or manhood and his swift plunge over the edge also compel the reader along with concealed currents.
These currents, however, spring from the reader's own history, a checkered past mixed up with a city that is simultaneously beautiful and dangerous, inviting and repulsive.
Robert shares this same confused, yet powerfully intimate relationship with San Antonio. The reader immediately empathizes with Robert, who makes references to the molinos, the "Edgewood School District," la matanza, the Alizondo Courts and the yerba buena of the West Side.
And while the educational system would be quick to label him as "at risk," we quickly realize he is no typical juvenile delinquent when he alludes to "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Catch 22," and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
His love of books and aversion to school, however, does place him squarely in a stereotype cornered by another literary character: Holden Caulfield from "Catcher in the Rye."
Although a strong comparison could be made between the two - both on a journey, both dropouts with strong ties to distant siblings - Robert is far more, well, likeable.
And while Holden's aversion to phonies seemed sometimes paranoid, Robert's demons are not so subtle. They scramble to meet him, beat him and kick out his four front teeth.
Still, Robert keeps getting up, and we root for the barrio boy each time, hoping he makes good, because when he stands up he stands for all the disregarded, misunderstood, underrepresented young men struggling on the West Side of our San Anto.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Patchy, but lovely
By Nada
This book hooked me by the first page. The protagonist, Roberto, an angry, troubled sixteen year-old whose family has recently fallen apart, is now living with his grandmother and trying for a fresh start at yet another school. Roberto's father is a jazz musician who's perpetually on the road. His self-serving view of life took a toll on his marriage years ago, eventually sending his wife over the edge with a nervous breakdown. She and her younger son have been whisked off to L.A. by a well-meaning aunt, but Robert, left behind to live with his grandmother, is guilt-ridden about the pointed exclusion.
Roberto settles into school with one goal in mind: stay out of trouble and save some money so he can go to California and reunite with his mother and brother. Reunite with them as the new man of the family with a new face of stability and maturity.
I found myself intrigued by Roberto from the get-go. He's slowing figuring out that his genetic inheritance is mostly the troubled side of each parent: his wanderlust and lack of commitment from his father, crippling anxiety and anger from his mother. But he has his grandmother to draw from as well, and she is straight, strong, and unflinching.
Beautifully crafted, DRIFT has many strengths. I found the characters engrossing, varied and authentic. The dialogue is unapologetic. Roberto's interior monologues and narration bring the Mexican-American culture in San Antonio and the grit and grime of low-paying jobs alive in all their ugliness.
Though the protagonist is sixteen, this book is for adults. The authentic teen voice will snag tenth to twelfth grade readers, but the larger themes of the book ask for a teacher's guidance.
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