Thoughts Without Cigarettes

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love) proves himself again with his autobiography, a memoir of childhood and early adulthood and a tribute to his father, who died early of heart failure induced by heavy smoking. Hijuelos was born in New York City in 1951, the second son of Cuban immigrants: his father a campesino, his mother from the impoverished upper class. The author's contrast between the richness of Cuban culture and hard times in America is striking, especially the angry brutality of teens from poor working-class families in tenement New York. Hijuelos documents what American teenagers faced in the late 1960s—both the escapades they enjoyed and the injustices they suffered—and does not shun the explicit. Readers will squirm at his description of the slaughter of a pig, be appalled at the callousness of staff at the children's hospital where he convalesced from nephritis, and wish to look away from sexual details of friends—and his parents. Hijuelos admits that his profuse writing style stemmed from desires to remember his father.