The ObserverFictionReviewThis immersive novel, expanded from a story in the New Yorker, follows a New Mexico household facing challenges and chances of redemption
The Five Wounds began life in 2009, as a story in the New Yorker. In the run-up to Easter, in a village in New Mexico, Amadeo – a 33-year-old unemployed, deadbeat alcoholic who lives with his mother – is preparing to be Jesus in a ritual re-enactment of the crucifixion. He carries the cross and then has his hands nailed to it in front of the watching crowd, which includes his 15-year-old daughter, Angel, who is eight months pregnant.
Quade was asked by her editor if she’d considered turning the story into a novel; she thought it was finished, yet found herself repeatedly coming back to the same family dynamics. And so The Five Wounds returns as a fully formed novel about three generations striving for the redemption that Amadeo aims for and misses in spectacular fashion on the cross. Quade picks up her story with Angel’s frustrated reaction to her father’s display: what she really needs is a dad who can actually help her, not perform empty gestures. How will he hold the baby with holes in his hands?
The village of Las Penas may be fictional, but the problems its Latinx families experience are all too realIn truth, you can still feel the joins between the original story and the rest of the book. But once you’re in, you’re really in, as Quade tightens the screws (hammers the nails?) on all her struggling characters. The village of Las Penas may be fictional, but the problems its Latinx families experience are all too real: lives are torn apart, slowly or suddenly, by unemployment, abuse, drink-driving, and addiction (there’s a heroin crisis in the community, as if booze wasn’t bad enough: “it’s genocide, and we’re doing it to ourselves”).
Amadeo’s attempts to become a better father and son are frequently excruciating: his plans to get rich fixing broken windshields with a kit he bought after viewing an infomercial give him the unbearably ill-fated optimism of an Arthur Miller character. Indulged by Yolanda, his long-suffering mother, he has never learned to take responsibility for his life.
But every generation of this family has its own cross to bear, as it were. Yolanda discovers she has a brain tumour, which she keeps secret, with a resentful lack of faith in her family’s ability to cope that builds as steadily as the cancerous growth. Angel is the warm heart of the book: an irrepressible creation, intently focused on finishing school, providing a better life for her child, and just bursting with love, yet also thrumming with all the usual uncertainties of being a teenager. She attends a class for expecting teens, where she becomes enamoured of her (white, middle-class) teacher, Brianna, and a troubled, charismatic fellow student called Lizette. Clashes ensue, muddied by Brianna dating Amadeo – an unlikely turn of events for which Quade finds an elegant, persuasive impulse.
Indeed, her story ticks along with a strong sense of horrible inevitability – every poor decision excavated and made very real. You are utterly within these characters, and within their world – dreaming of a better life, just as they do. After a slow start, The Five Wounds turns into a propulsive, immersive story that reckons wisely with the real cost of redemption.
The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade is published by Serpent’s Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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