BRANDO SKYHORSE at a round table with ELEANOR CATTON and ALI SMITH, October 30, noon, Fleck Dance Theatre.
Funny thing about identity, you never know when it’s going to creep into your consciousness.
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Take Brando Skyhorse, for example. He was brought up believing his stepfather, an American Indian, was his birth father and he himself was native American. It wasn’t until he was 12 and asking his mum questions about when she’d met his live-in dad that he realized the math didn’t add up. The guy he was living with was not his real father.
In a high-pitched voice – Skyhorse sounds like he’s in a perpetual state of breathless excitement – he describes how his mother had embraced the Hollywood ethos entirely. She’d reinvented herself, as many people do when they come to L.A., after his biological father, a Mexican immigrant, abandoned them when Skyhorse was three.
“She got caught up in the whole myth-making that the city thrives on,” Skyhorse explains on the phone from his home in Jersey City. “She used the name Running Deer Skyhorse at the time. If you had a choice between Running Deer Skyhorse or Mari Banaga, what would you choose?”
Though he kept the name, the young Skyhorse went on to embrace his Mexican roots, especially the Latino experience in Los Angeles. His exceptional debut novel, The Madonnas Of Echo Park, spins a series of tales set in the mid-80s about Mexicans trying to assimilate.
“What Los Angeles was missing was not only a novel about the ethnic experience, but an L.A. novel in general,” he explains. “I was looking for a novel that wasn’t about Hollywood or crime.”
Throughout the stories, pop culture figures prominently. The title story, for example, and the novel’s lynchpin, around which all the characters revolve, is about a drive-by shooting in which a girl dressed as Madonna, dancing to the Material Girl’s hit Borderline, is killed. And Skyhorse makes a point of mentioning in the last chapter that Echo Park Lake is where Roman Polanski shot key sequences of Chinatown.
“As a joke, I counted up the pop culture references, starting with the title, and it’s obvious pop culture is more than just a passing interest,” he admits.
“It always intrigued me that in all the movies I grew up with – especially John Hughes’s movies – minorities are non-existent. All my friends in high school were Mexican, and none of us had the big John Hughes houses or cars or big televisions, and yet those were all the movies we loved.”
Skyhorse’s characters run the gamut from a woman cleaning house for a wealthy Hollywood housewife to a reactionary streetcar driver to a gay gang member just out of prison.
“It was important to me to integrate the story of the ex-gang-member into the Latino fabric. He’s part of an ethnic minority that’s getting heat from the mainstream, but then he’s getting heat in his own community – largely Catholic.
“Most of my Latino community voted for Reagan. I hope, given the illegal immigration issues surfacing now, that Latinos are eying their Republican affiliations very closely.”
Skyhorse got his first break as a writer when he attended a creative writing workshop at the University of California at Irvine, alongside some stellar classmates.
“Alice Sebold, Glen Gold, Aimee Bender, screenwriter Phil Hay,” he catalogues. “Six out of seven went on to become published writers. That’s an insane ratio. Alice’s book [The Lovely Bones] was the biggest-selling debut in 25 years. Aimee Bender had enormous success last summer with Lemon Cake. To see all of that from the sidelines, it made me wonder, where did I go wrong?”
He calls himself the Joe Piscopo of his writing workshop, a comment that’s been quoted often in interviews. Now that his own impressive book has been released – and glowingly reviewed – it’s probably time to lose that line.
Interview Clips
More on identity
On coming out Mexican
On the diminishing numbers of review outlets
On the value of the bookstore
susanc@nowtoronto.com
