San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Pitbull imitator does Scarface impression with a nod to Melville
To call the novel “Say Hello to My Little Friend” by awardwinning author Jennine Capó Crucet a book about Miami would be akin to calling “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville just a book about a whale.
Crucet, like Melville, has created so much more than simply a novel. This is an experience. And while, yes, there is a whale (more on that later), this is also the story of Ismael “Izzy” Reyes, 20, who, having just received a ceaseand-desist letter for impersonating the entertainer Pitbull (aka Mr. 305! aka Mr. Worldwide!), decides — as the novel’s title suggests — that the “time had come for him to accept his destiny, to believe that the world really could be his, to embrace his Cuban birth and his huge balls; he would remake himself into Tony Montana for the new millennium, Miami’s modernday Scarface.”
Knowing the 1983 Al Pacino film “Scarface” (where the title of Crucet’s novel originates) about a young Cuban immigrant who creates a sort of achievement list of money, power and women isn’t exactly a prerequisite for reading this book, but that list does inform the reader on the intended order of things.
What ensues is nothing short of an odyssey of Scarface-like ambition, where Izzy attempts to not only become a Tony Montana-like character, but “surpass” him. Izzy soon goes off course, continually revising and reworking his plan. Because — surprise! — this is real life and not a movie.
Through it all, Crucet subverts the expectations of Scarface’s 1980s Miami, calling out the stereotypes created and magnified by the lens of Hollywood in the same way that Gary Shteyngart once burst onto the literary scene with the so-satrical-there-might-besome-truth-to-them novels “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” and “Absurdistan.” Crucet’s book, like Shteyngart’s writing, is so rich with dark humor that its sentences can both lift and break the reader’s heart. Among many things, Izzy is an orphan who has pushed down the traumas of his life leading up to and encompassing the days he was adrift on a raft from Cuba at the age of 7.
For Izzy, these memories appear in muddled glimpses. But the key to unlocking them is not Izzy or his Scarfacerelated ambition, but an orca
Jennine Capó Crucet, like Melville, has created so much more than simply a novel.
This is an experience.
whale (I told you there would be a whale) named Lolita: taken as a baby from “the gray waves of Penn Cove, all the way over in Washington State” and imprisoned for years in a too-small tank in the Miami Seaquarium. Crucet’s ability to switch from Izzy — brought on a raft from Cuba, orphaned by his mother along the way, and then raised by an aunt in Miami — to the other orphaned and isolated consciousness of Lolita is one of the novel’s superpowers.
While Izzy begins his attempt to out-Scarface Tony Montana by finding “a more dangerous pet” than a tiger, it is not Izzy that brings them together but Lolita, “swaying her fat-filled jawbone in and out of the water” as she stretches her consciousness far beyond the walls of her tank, directing Izzy to find “something like her.”
It is Lolita — through her ability to perceive the world far beyond her concrete walls — that knows Izzy best. She is the one who senses his pain. She is the one who sees that his impersonations of first Pitbull and then Tony Montana are a bandage for the wound Izzy is unaware of but searches for nonetheless. Or, as Crucet writes, “Lolita — might be the catalyst for all he is truly after.”
“Say Hello to My Little Friend” is a superb, incredibly entertaining and purposefully off-kilter novel about reinvention, memory, and the good and bad baggage that comes along with life for both human and whalekind, surpassing even Tony Montana’s wildest dreams.