The Consequences: Stories by Manuel Muñoz

Review by Jess Moody

‘I decided nothing fair had ever been asked of me by anyone’.

For his first book in ten years, acclaimed short-story writer Manuel Muñoz gives us ten stories of lives lived across and beyond borders. Centring on Mexican and Mexican-American experiences in mostly 1980s California and Texas – and particularly the small-towns and fieldwork of Muñoz’s own upbringing – these are confident and complex tales, curious as to how compassion survives wearing times.

Muñoz uses character-driven tales to explore the contradictions of life and labour, leaving his protagonists to judge their own choices and those around them. In more than one story, women wait side by side to see if their men will come home from the fields or face deportation: wives and girlfriends testing each other’s trust, and the limits of their own pride. In another, a man moves into surburbia with his boyfriend, only to experience the unease of class pretensions, drinking away the loneliness of a crowd.

In the title piece ‘The Consequences’, Marc regrets abandoning his sick lover Teddy to his conservative family, hurrying cross-country to gate-crash his funeral. Muñoz repeatedly dwells on what a knowingness of the world does to those who carry it: how does one grow amid ever-present threat? How does knowledge bind and constrict a relationship? What sympathy is there for those still innocent or ignorant of certain truths?

‘Come, I tell her again, when we reach the edge of the park, and here, I know, is where her eyes will be opened, where she’ll learn to never again wear a purple dress on such a trip. Stay with me, I tell her as we approach the benches filled with men…’

This ‘knowing’ is sometimes personal, but often inextricably linked with the traumas and histories of shared community – whether of gender, sexuality, language or ancestry. Perhaps the accomplishment of this collection is in questioning the inevitability of all these inherited ‘harsh truths’ and leaving space for new understandings. We see this beautifully done in ‘Fieldwork’, as an unemployed son helps his father recover from a stroke. Generational memories of men’s labour are carefully and cautiously shared out with the food around the breakfast table: echoes of family duty, care and obligation in every tired and proud conversation. Yet a final shattering line from his mother reveals all that memory can miss.

As a collection The Consequences is even cleverly structured to challenge its own narratives. While at first glance these are all unique narratives, we catch certain characters walking in and out of each other’s stories, to trouble our knowledge of what has come before. Two women thrown together in ‘The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA’, walk across another protagonist’s gaze in a bus station in ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’, and are misread as ‘sisters’. A woman in a pink Pismo Beach shirt links two stories at the extremes of domesticity and violence. Teddy, the abandoned lover last ‘seen’ at his funeral service in ‘Presumido’ is revived as Teo and returned to his rebellious youth and his sister’s care in the final story. There is, it seems, always more than one way to see a life.

The Consequences is a collection of many threads, stories, memories, and choices. There is love here, and violence, and betrayal, and tenderness. Mostly there is the challenge of what it is to relate to others, and beautiful observances of the nuances of relationships, whether between lovers, parents and children, neighbours and strangers.

‘They listened to each other. They seemed to know how to ask questions that let them tell just enough of who they were. They recognised in each other where they could be transparent and yet not reveal anything’.

The prose is clear, full of strong voices and dialogues (usually flowing without quotation marks) which hold their passions careful and contained. Much is unsaid, but not unwatched, or unremembered While characters carry their collective legacies, together their stories suggest re-imaginings could yet be possible. This is a moving and intelligent collection that reminds us that love and kindness can look like many things: their consequences stretching far and wide.

‘He began to weep. He hadn’t loved Teddy and yet now he did. He deserved this feeling’.

The Consequences is published by The Indigo Press, 20 October 2022