HAVE GUITAR, WILL TRAVEL

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

From the Philippines to the United States. From San Francisco to New York City. From the '70s to the '80s, from jazz to rock, from lumpia (a Filipino dish) to peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, from Tagalog (a language native to the Philippines) to English, from assimilation blues to a graceful homecoming. Jessica Hagedorn's new novel, The Gangster of Love, is a book about transition, movement, emigration, immigration and repatriation. Though the title could hardly be sillier or more ungainly--it sounds like an afterhours movie on Cinemax--the book itself is written with wit and style and ultimately achieves an elegant poignancy.

Hagedorn tells the story of the Riveras, a Filipino family that moves to the United States in 1970. While the father of the clan, Francisco, stays behind in the Philippines with his mistress, the mother, Milagros (a "volatile" woman given to pricey shopping sprees after fights with her husband), travels to America with her emotionally troubled son Voltaire (who has a penchant for bringing home strangers ranging from "a man with a rat's face" to "a burned-out ballerina") and her troublemaking daughter Rocky.

Though the book switches voices and perspectives--sometimes it is told from Milagros' point of view, sometimes through the voices of other side characters--for the most part the book focuses on Rocky. She is a pugnacious, tough-talking sort. She loses her virginity to a rock-'n'-roll rebel named Elvis Chang, co-founds a rock band with him named the Gangster of Love, and carries on a years-long flirtatious friendship with a bisexual painter-photographer named Keiko.

The novel gets some of its energy and power through the contrast and conflict between Rocky's Filipino heritage, personified by her domineering mother, and her adopted American bohemian culture, championed by bandmate-lover Elvis Chang. "My mother once confessed how much sex revolted her," Rocky says, shortly after sleeping with Elvis. "'Romance is what I crave,' she said. 'Sex is for men and animals'...I dreamed about sex, wrote about it, sang about it; I got down and dirty when I talked about it." When Rocky's mother starts up a family business making and delivering Filipino food, Rocky leaves home with Elvis to pursue a music career in Los Angeles and, later, New York City. Toward the end of the book her mother becomes senile and begins to forget her English; Rocky, for her part, is no longer able to remember her Tagalog as she grows into middle age.

"I've forgotten so much of the language, and it exasperates me," Rocky says. "Big holes when I try to speak. Like, how do you say sugar? I remember aswang for vampire, asin for salt. But not sugar. I've dreamed entire dreams in Tagalog, but I don't know what I'm saying."

Hagedorn's first novel, Dogeaters, was widely acclaimed and was nominated for the National Book Award. The Gangster of Love should firmly establish her reputation as a writer of considerable talent. The book's only misstep is in its portrayal of Sly, a black member of the band the Gangster of Love, and the only significant black character in the entire book. Sly is the group's drummer, his last name is Washington, and he lusts after white women, abuses drugs and carries a gun--in other words he's a pistol-toting, coke-snorting caricature.

Still, most of this book is elegant and smart, deftly capturing the pain of leaving a country behind and the struggle to adapt to a new one. It's a story that's been told many times before, and about many other ethnic groups, but the story that Hagedorn (who was born in the Philippines but moved to the U.S. when she was in her teens) tells has something more traditional immigrant narratives lack: because her tale is told through a rock band, rock-'n'-roll attitude runs through her prose. She takes us to dank nightclubs and out on tour; Jimi Hendrix appears in fantasy sequences. Rock can be loud, sweet, intrusive, tragic, incomprehensible, triumphant. What better vehicle, then, to capture the emotions of the immigrant experience?

--By Christopher John Farley