House on Mango Street

Cheated. That's how I feel now that I've finished Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street. My copy of the book is a deceptive 108 pages long, but without all of the white space separating chapters, I doubt it would be longer than 65. A hour after I started, I was finished. Sunday editions of newspapers have taken me longer to peruse for only a few dollars compared to the $11 cost of Mango Street. If I didn't have a conscience, I probably would have just sat in the bookstore to read it without buying it. The book simply seems too short to get value from, but that assumes that value increases with length.

The format is certainly intriguing--a series of vignettes (or snapshots) of a childhood--but the discontinuity created by this style left me craving flowcharts and diagrams. Almost all of the "chapters" were written just like a child was trying to verbally tell an adult a story at an exasperated, breathless pace. At the end of many, I was unsure of exactly what happened or how it affected the characters. While many novels build on previous events to give a deeper understanding, most of the events in Mango Street are seemingly unconnected. At one point, the main character Esperanza Cordero describes the first day at her first job, then doesn't refer to any other events at the job for the rest of the book. Life doesn't progress discretely, rather it's continuous with events (work, sleep, food, visiting with a good friend, etc.) reoccurring.

Looking back on the book, it reads like a Facebook timeline. Each event or portion of Esperanza's life gets 15 seconds of fame before being relegated to posterity. The shortness of each section precludes a deeper understanding of Esperanza. I know all of the major events, but not what happens in between. If that were enough to understand a story, then why would I want to watch a movie after seeing a trailer?

With that being said, there is a definite change in Esperanza's demeanor. At the beginning of the story, she is obviously still lost in the innocence of childhood. One of the hallmarks of childhood is an inability to develop cause and effect relationships when making decisions and she doesn't seem to understand the implications of some of her actions. For example, when she decides she wants to eat lunch at school in the "canteen," she doesn't think about her food being cold by that time. Before, her lunch was always warm because her mom made it fresh when she returned for lunch. Instead, she suffered through a cold lunch after asking her mother to lie to the nuns at the school about why she had to eat in the canteen rather than go home.

In the latter half of the book, she suddenly becomes more of an adult when facing the mature concepts of sexuality and the death of loved ones. Her friend Sally obviously is not a child anymore and by hanging out with her, Esperanza gets dragged into adulthood. This change happens in just a few pages with little clear delineation between childhood and young adulthood. With a longer novel, the change would have been more gradual and comprehensible. Thirty pages after eating lunch at the school, Esperanza faces the concept of sexual assault first-hand.

In my mind, a longer version of Esperanza's story would be more enjoyable and impactful. She obviously changes over the course of the novel, but it happens so quickly that there is little time to develop the distinctions between child and adult. Maybe the quick change is why the novel is so acclaimed, but I would prefer a more comprehensive version of the story.