Xochitl Gonzalez debuts with smart romantic comedy
The opening chapter of Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel, “Olga Dies Dreaming,” is all about napkins — wildly overpriced wedding reception napkins. That may sound like a small cloth in which to wrap a big book, but Gonzalez folds those napkins into a satire of consumer excess, an appraisal of business morality and a study of family relations.
In short: Don’t underestimate this new novelist. She’s jump-starting the year with a smart romantic comedy that lures us in with laughter and keeps us hooked with a fantastically engaging story.
Gonzalez’s heroine is Olga Isabel Acevedo, a 40-year-old dynamo from South Brooklyn. At a young age, Olga set her sights on success and never wavered — not when her mother abandoned her and not when her father died after contracting AIDS. “Every single thing she had done with her life she had figured out for herself,” Gonzalez writes. Now, as the owner of a business she built from scratch, Olga charges well-heeled women in New York, Dallas and Palm Beach a fortune to plan their weddings. If that involves fencing liquor from Russian mobsters and overcharging brides for phantom place settings, who’s counting?
Presumably, Gonzalez is pulling at least some of these funny shenanigans from her own experience: She once worked as a wedding planner herself. But it’s the tremendous verve of her prose that makes these pages crackle — the way she captures Olga’s air traffic controller command of every incoming and outgoing waiter, caterer and vendor to create each client’s magical day.
Alas, while Olga can make every couple’s dream come true (for a price), she can’t seem to find romance herself. Even her own assistant notes, “You don’t have a single, actual romantic bone in your body.” Ouch! Although Olga has little use for God, she finds herself praying, “Please, let me know what it is to feel loved again.” If you know anything about how romantic comedy — or God — works, you have some idea of how this story ends, but you’ll be completely surprised by how it gets there.
As the novel opens, Olga is trying to extract herself from a zombie relationship with a hardware store mogul who thinks sending photos of his crotch is the height of courtship. Her latest onenight stand is Matteo, a swarthy sad sack who confesses that he’s a hoarder. Worse, he peppers her with intrusive questions about her professional dedication to rich jerks. But when she tells him to get lost, Matteo won’t budge. “I’m not trying to diss you,” he says. “I’m just genuinely curious about you.”
That may be the most erotic thing anyone has ever said to Olga. After so many dead-end relationships, this odd guy, who sleeps with his socks on, makes her “feel a glimmer of possibility that this time she might be understood.”
Meanwhile, Gonzalez develops a rich parallel story about Olga’s brother, Prieto. He’s a popular U.S. congressman who represents Brooklyn and takes a special interest in Puerto Rico. A codeswitching political Jedi, Prieto jokes with guys on the street corner just as naturally as he flatters rich donors who call him the Latino Obama. But as a closeted gay man being blackmailed by shady real estate developers, Prieto is risking his reputation, his career and even his freedom.
As these two siblings charge ahead with their successful but precarious lives, Gonzalez periodically interrupts the novel with old letters from their errant mother, who ran off to join the Young Lords and fight for Puerto Rico’s independence. Olga never saw Mami again, but every few years, one of her notes mysteriously arrives to castigate Olga for catering to capitalist pigs.
If this is a novel about toxic family secrets, it’s also a novel about clandestine national schemes. Aside from a collection of winning characters and an ingenious plot, what’s most impressive about “Olga Dies Dreaming” is the way Gonzalez stretches the seams of the rom-com genre to accommodate her complex analysis of racial politics. She’s particularly wise about the way successful people of color must wend their way through American culture, negotiating with neighborhood suspicion on one side and white condescension on the other.
But Gonzalez never loses sight of
Olga and her quest to find love without selling her soul — or a thousand overpriced napkins. Rarely does a novel, particularly a debut novel, contend so powerfully and so delightfully with such a vast web of personal, cultural, political and even international imperatives. For fiction lovers, what an auspicious start to 2022.