A journey through a tangled web of identity

FRANCISCO Goldberg , the narrator of Monkey Boy, might be easily confused with the author Francisco Goldman.

Like Goldman, the acclaimed Guatemalan American author of The Art of Political Murder, Goldberg has recently published an exposé of a political murder.

The year is 2007 and 49-yearold Francisco (aka Frank or Frankie Gee), just off a dangerous stint doing investigative journalism in Mexico City, is on his way from New York City to Boston to visit his mamita in a nursing home. That’s the plot.

But the literal train ride is mostly a pretext for the train of thought Frank conducts along the way, with stopovers at key points in his past, reflections on recent political history and speculations about his romantic prospects.

While hoping to coax some old secrets out of his memory-challenged mother – about her ancestry, her girlhood, her long, unhappy marriage to his father – Frank is clearly trying to make sense of his own experience, itself subject to lapsed or distorted memory. His notquite-estranged younger sister, for instance, remembers brutal episodes of their childhood differently and more distinctly than he does.

Frankie, however, does remember plenty, and his stories entwine personal identity, political history and identity politics until they’re virtually, and judiciously, indistinguishable.

The deep secret of a greatgrandmother’s African heritage, for example, is implicated in his own racial experience (his friend “joked that whatever country I went to, the people from that country always saw me as being of whatever brown ethnic group was most despised there”).

His Guatemalan roots are entangled with the country’s culture of corruption and violence. Even his career as a writer has its connection with the “commodification of ethnicity and race”.

Most perplexing is the mystery of his own make-up – Jewish, American, Catholic, Guatemalan – a quandary that carries him from the “I want to be just one thing” of boyhood to

“Why can’t I just be nothing?” to “It’s okay to be always an outsider”.