Francisco Goldman’s Monkey Boy, which can easily be considered biographical, is the kind of novel that shows you real horror while simultaneously making you laugh ... Goldman does many things right in Monkey Boy. The first one is that he excels at that ineffable thing we call 'readability,' for lack of a better word. Reading this book is like reading a family saga, a memoir and a novel while listening to an old friend telling stories about his life ... Monkey Boy is fiction that feels like nonfiction; a story of growing up a marginalized citizen in white suburbia, as well as a narrative about learning family history and the way migration has shaped the world. And it’s all carried by Goldman’s distinct style. His words will linger in the minds and hearts of readers long after they’ve turned the last page.
... a memory book, a novel that reads like an autobiographical immersion, a story that travels relentlessly between a difficult present and an unfinished past ... full of rebellious comedy and vitality. Goldman is a natural storyteller—funny, intimate, sarcastic, all-noticing ... The prose is loose-jointed, hybrid, elastic ... hospitable rhythms of prose ... The density of the memory, the playing over present and past, the essayistic space made for an ongoing political dimension, along with an insistent optimism—all these are characteristic of the novel as a whole, and of Goldman’s feel for a kind of narrative phrasing that allows an ideally sauntering and shifting perspective ... steadily becomes a moving and tender elegy for a woman who seems to have spent most of her life suspended warily between visceral love of her birthplace and learned gratitude for her adopted home ... impatient with conventional novelistic structuring, bolder in some respects than Goldman’s first novel, is desperate to seek a reckoning that, if it does not exactly lie beyond fiction, may sit uneasily within it ... In The Long Night of White Chickens, the narrator’s father is portrayed as genial and sweet-natured, a truly good man. With terminal ferocity, “Monkey Boy” sets that record straight, bringing both parents out of fictional camouflage and into something that feels like the transparency of memoir.
This is a journalist’s notebook and an artist’s sketchbook—every detail vivid and meaningful, every captivating character a portal into the struggle for freedom and dignity. Although steeped in trauma and loneliness, prejudice and brutality, secrets and lies, Goldman’s ravishing, multidirectional novel is also iridescent with tenderness, comedic absurdity, sensual infatuation, reclaimed love, the life-sustaining desire to 'remember every single second,' and the redemption of getting every element just right.
... by taking us along with him, drawing us so deftly into moments of intimacy and worldliness, brutality and beauty, the author effectively ceases to be an outsider. In Monkey Boy he has crafted his own E pluribus unum, with room enough for stories lived, written or read — and, of course, for the two Franciscos, Goldberg and Goldman.
... masterful ... This is past as Proustian landscape, as world ... Goldman’s blending of fiction and autobiography, though, is distinct from that of its most famous current practitioners. For them, autofiction arises from exhaustion with the fictionalizing impulse itself...For Goldman, by contrast, the autobiographical novel isn’t the last puff of a dying genre but a form through which to consider the competing moral and aesthetic demands of the real and the imagined ... a fascinating hybrid at the level of plot. It is digressive and meandering, moving into the personal or familial past for a paragraph or two before returning to the narrative present before drifting off again. (All of which is to say, it doesn’t feel terribly plotted.) At the same time, the novel is tightly, almost symmetrically structured, concerned from beginning to end with the possibility, and transformative power, of love ... seems almost an anti-novel. Why make things up when you can borrow from life? Why construct a linear narrative when life doesn’t seem to possess one? On the other hand, it is a quietly traditional, even romantic novel committed to the idea that the self can be changed through memory and love, honesty and vulnerability ... doesn’t jettison fiction for nonfiction, the artificial for the real, but considers the truths of both. The novel is dead; long live the novel.
Like Frankie, Goldman is an author made up of many parts. Part Catholic and part Jewish, part American and part Guatemalan, he has invented in this novel a universe that allows his character and himself to explore what it means to be a whole person when so much of one’s 'self' is divided ... The travails of Frankie’s family are the novel’s greatest strength ... These more powerful themes save Monkey Boy from becoming just another 'men without women' tale. To be sure, the reader is treated to a rundown of Frankie’s many girlfriends...Yet this is no list of conquests. Instead, we see Frankie reflecting on the pivotal role women have played in his life, providing him safety and succor over the years. They have helped soften the isolation and loneliness he experienced first as an abused child, later as a wandering writer detached from close relations, and always as a racial outsider ... Indeed, it is that sense of persistent loneliness that drives the narrative and gives it its poignancy. Thanks to Francisco Goldman’s skill, we are compelled to recognize Frankie Goldberg’s melancholy and allow it to wash over us.
... a way to confront, work through, and even embrace these dark and unhappy legacies, to find meaning and joy in them ... seeks not only to tell us a story set in 'America'; it asks us whether there ever was such a place. Breaking Goldberg’s identity into its constituent parts—English- and Spanish-speaking, of Latinx and Jewish ancestry, residing in large cosmopolitan cities and in the suburbs of New England—Goldman’s narrative suggests that America has never been one thing or another, but rather a constantly shifting constellation of socially constructed affiliations, stitched together in memory and experience ... Goldberg is an extremely fluid, knowing narrator. His grasp of Boston and of New York City, particularly the Upper West Side and Brooklyn, is that of an insider. Yet the cool, calm, collected way he moves through and describes these cosmopolitan and urban spaces only makes his revelations about his father’s cruelty all the more unnerving ... Goldman at once explains how trauma is passed on through his parents’ experience of mid-20th-century America and—particularly through his passionate rejection of its American Dream and the violence of American-backed dictatorship—offers an unsparing critique.
The sequence’s dreamlike leaps, in a narrative whose revelations have up to now felt finely measured, threaten to lose the reader. It’s almost as if the creator of this narrator who’s convinced us that the events he’s recounted all occurred during one weekend rather than over several visits, as perhaps seems more likely, wants to remind us that we’re reading a work of fiction whose author’s name isn’t Goldberg but Goldman. But this is the prerogative of a novelist. And it may be the imperative of this one, who is both the son of a society 'that somehow collectively realized there was a certain kind of truthfulness it was essential to do without' and a writer who, as Goldman once told an interviewer, has 'never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway' ... Either way, the memoir-as-novel Goldman has written about the people who made him breathes with expiation. It’s an unloading of truths that no longer feel heavy, in a life that has landed, as this book’s end suggests, in a good place: his crush texts him back.
Goldman's—or Goldberg's?—immersive, restless narrative style expertly plays the rhythms of thought and remembrance, weaving in his past and current romances, his investigation of and published work on Guatemalan terror, ultimately the quest for a whole made of so many halves ... The warmth and humanity of Goldman's storytelling are impossible to resist.
...captivating ... It’s the scenes with Frank and Yolanda that make the book come alive ... Goldman’s direct, intimate writing alone is worth the price of admission
Fusing elements of creative nonfiction with autoethnography, Francisco Goldman creates the speculative ghost of a parallel life in Francisco Goldberg ... Fans of Goldman’s bibliography will find much to delight in here.
