The Water Museum

Across more than two decades, Luis Alberto Urrea’s writing has shuttled between Mexico and America, from fiction to nonfiction, from magic realism to street-level reportage. The sole consistency throughout has been his apparent commitment to a bigger footprint with each volume. Starting with his 2005 novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea began mining his Mexican background, and particularly his great-aunt’s past in nineteenth-century Mexico, to explore the immigrant experience on an epic scale. In that book, its 2011 sequel, Queen of America, and 2009’s Into the Beautiful North, Urrea kept seeking more and more room to connect Dickensian detail with the grit and splendor of Latin American and southwestern U.S. fiction. Even the native flora overflowed with poetic potential: “Gold poppies. Desert rose mallow. Chihuahua flax. Buffalo gourd. Mendota. Twinleaf. Desert gold. Ghostflower. Chuparosa.”

By comparison, The Water Museum, Urrea’s first story collection in more than a decade, seems more like a retreat, or at least a breather: thirteen stories, a couple of them flash-fiction sketches, filling a modest 250-odd pages. But perhaps it’s more accurate to call the book a reminder, both of Urrea’s virtues and of short fiction’s. Three of the stories here originally appeared in his debut collection, 2002’s Six Kinds of Sky, and practically every story revisits time-honored themes of coming-of-age, broken homes, and broken relationships. The difference is Urrea’s style, which has plenty of range but never loses focus on people stuck in one borderland or another.

One of them is Junior, the young man at the center of “The National City Reparation Society,” who’s tried to escape his southern California Hispanic roots (“shake off the dark”) but is roped back in by Chango, a friend from the old neighborhood who has a scheme to pilfer TVs and other valuables from the bounty of recently foreclosed homes. Junior’s job is to provide a veneer of legality should cops sniff around: “You know how to talk white,” Chango tells him, and for a time it works. “I love the recession!” Chango proclaims, a line too nakedly hubristic to allow him to escape punishment. But Urrea complicates the predicament in its final turn: Is Chango’s opportunism, he asks, any worse morally than Junior’s ability to use his privilege to escape harm?

There’s a similar twist in the story “Amapola,” which opens as an interior tale of young unrequited love before it explodes into something more audacious. The naive narrator has fallen for a friend’s teenage sister — the Amapola of the title — and the story’s first half is thick with the lust and innocence of young infatuation. (After a movie date, he writes, “I could have pole-vaulted right out of the theater.”) But Amapola is Spanish for “poppy,” which hints at where the family wealth comes from, and as the story makes a sudden shift into a more violent register, Urrea has forced his Casanova to decide what kind of loyalty he’ll exchange for love. (Though the story isn’t a mystery or crime story in any conventional sense, the twist is wild and dark enough to have won an Edgar.)

Ambition reined in by family and opportunity cut short by (usually white) authority are mainstays of American ethnic fiction — the central question in works like Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, and Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is how much distance you can put between you and your roots before you’re denying yourself. The Water Museum works that turf, too, but Urrea’s particular talent is in taking the theme seriously while handling it with a light, even comic touch. In the now-classic “Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses,” the white narrator recalls the moment he fell for his future Native American wife as absurdly conflicted: “She cornered me, waving a tire iron in my face. God she was beautiful.” Likewise, in “The Sous Chefs of Iogua,” a white Iowan fumes at the local Mexican immigrants’ inability to assimilate: “Christ on a waffle — these people were like children” — just one of the baffling English idioms that widen the cultural divides throughout the story.

Throughout these stories, Urrea is carefully — but not laboriously — balancing humor and pathos. He admires nature (Idaho buttes, the roiling Pacific, the wide-open Sonoran Desert) while exposing his characters’ disheartening failures to navigate it. In “Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush,” a boy dreams of escaping his Mexican village while watching the ridiculous parade of clutter washing down the river: “a green De Soto with its lights on, a washing machine with a religious statue in it as thought the saint were piloting a circular boat, a blond wig that looked like a giant squid, a mysterious star-shaped object barely visible under the surface.” That moment seems an apt metaphor for Urrea’s storytelling: A sense of wonder at the weird overflowing landscape, matched with a dangerous but ungovernable curiosity about what might be going on downstream.