From the Publisher

This sweeping drama of intimately connected families--black, white, and Latino--boldly conjures up the ever-shifting cultural mosaic that is America. At its heart is Vidamía Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who sets out in search of the father she has never known. Her journey takes her from her affluent suburban home to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where her father Billy Farrell now lives with his second family. Once a gifted jazz pianist, Billy lost two fingers in the Vietnam War and has since shut himself off from jazz. As Billy's colorful new family draws her into their fold, so Vidamia determines to draw her father back into the world he left behind.

The New York Times

Edgardo Vega Yunqué is a Puerto Rican-born New York writer who came of age in the 1950's, among the scrappy Irish kids of the South Bronx. This powerhouse of a novel, with a hard-working title to match, is his fourth book -- Vega Yunqué is also the author of an earlier novel and two collections of short stories -- and it brings vividly to life, with its polyphony of voices, the simmering ethnic stew of the great American city. — Julia Livshin

The Washington Post

The you-gotta-be-kidding title may make you want to snort or shake your head. But it suits this sprawling, iconoclastic, ambitious, stunningly written novel that is part picaresque, part Bildungsroman and part recapitulation of America's last half-century. The blues, after all, which the author evokes in his title, is this country's home brew -- a complex but melodious amalgam. — Gene Santoro

Publishers Weekly

Yunque's sprawling, old-fashioned debut, a multigenerational melting-pot epic set in New York City in the 1980s, is populated by a host of characters with patchwork identities: white, Puerto Rican, black, rich, poor. At the center of the tangled web is Puerto Rican-Irish Vidamia Farrell, daughter of upwardly mobile Elsa Santiago and Vietnam War vet Billy Farrell. Vidamia meets her father for the first time when she is 12 and discovers that she has two families: she lives with her strict mother and CPA stepfather in an affluent New York suburb, but she is powerfully drawn to her father's bohemian household on Manhattan's rough Lower East Side. Her father is a former jazz pianist whose career was cut short by the war, which cost him two fingers and his sanity. Vidamia is fascinated by his story and becomes fast friends with her stepsister Cookie, a dazzlingly blonde homegirl; when she is almost 17, she falls in love with Wyndell Ross, a black saxophonist. A multitude of secondary characters are fully developed: Elsa, Vidamia's mother, who struggles to leave the barrio behind; Fawn, Cookie's doomed poet sister; Maud, Billy's bar-owning Irish mother. The author's storytelling is unapologetically sentimental and rambling; his loving depiction of New York's Puerto Rican subculture reflects the full spectrum of city life. A brutal rape and a violent act of retaliation bring the novel to a sobering close, but Yunqu (The Comeback, etc.) leaves his readers with a sense of hope and hard-won harmony. (Oct.) Forecast: Yunqu has long been a fixture on the New York underground literary circuit. The publisher clearly intends for this to be his breakout book, and it does have populist appeal, though some may find its earnest racial explorations dated. Author tour. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Given the title, readers may be excused for expecting excess. And, indeed, this epic tale explores racial and sexual identity, the Vietnam War, interracial romance, urban violence, and the New York jazz scene of the late 1960s, woven into a complex tapestry that makes for a long-winded but compelling enough read. The book centers on teenager Vidamia Farrell, daughter of a well-to-do Puerto Rican family but the child of a brief liaison her mother had with a promising young American jazz pianist. Billy Farrell had a chance to play with Miles Davis, but he returns from Vietnam with a mangled hand and a heavy conscience over his platoon's misdeeds. When Vidamia appears in his life, she manages to break through Billy's shell and sets him once again on the path of pursuing the music he loved. Though this is the crux of the novel, the truism "everyone has a story" is fleshed out here, with myriad profiles from each family's history. This rich and perhaps overripe story, with its sometimes jarring changes in tone (including a very sad and violent climax), recalls John Irving, both flaws and triumphs intact, and is recommended to the not insubstantial audience that enjoys work like his. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/03.]-Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Ethnic pride and multiculturalism are the themes that propel this huge, consciously symphonic novel, a breakout book for the "underground" author (Mendoza’s Dreams, not reviewed, etc.). Vidamia Farrell, a Puerto Rican/Irish-American teenager moves purposefully between the opposed "worlds" of Tarrytown, where she lives in affluence with her mother Elsa (a prominent Manhattan psychotherapist) and stepfather, and Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where Vidamia is reunited with the families of her father Billy Farrell, a wounded and traumatized Vietnam vet. Guilt-ridden for failing to prevent his best friend Joey Santiago’s death in combat, Billy has renounced a once-promising career as a jazz pianist (when a teenager, he had "jammed" with Miles Davis). As Vidamia sets about to revive his talent and motivation, Vega Yunqué swoops energetically through the entangled lives and histories of several intensely realized characters. Prominent among them are Elsa, who’s at constant war with real and imagined limitations imposed by her heritage; Billy’s stoical black mentor, musician-composer Alfred Butterworth; Vidamia’s white half-sisters, Cookie, on the fast track to NYC’s Performing Arts High School, and Fawn, a hopeful poet cursed by a congenital sexual deformity; Wyndell Ross, the gifted black saxophonist who becomes Vidamia’s lover; and Carlos "Papo" Marcano, from the violence-prone slum of Alphabet City, whose sexual demands precipitate the catastrophic climax. No Matter is melodramatic, hortatory, and redundant; no matter: it’s also passionate and powerful, perhaps inspired (as internal evidence suggests) by James Baldwin’s Another Country. In fact, it’s as if Vega Yunqué intended an anti-AnotherCountry: a book whose characters are too full of life and strength to be destroyed by racism. And its loving, vibrant portrayal of Vidamia’s assumption into maturity will remind many of Betty Smith’s often underrated popular classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. A Puerto Rican American epic, and a reading experience not to be missed. Agent: Thomas Colchie

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No Matter How Much You Promise

Picador USA

Chapter One

In the not so merry month of May 1988, when her studies had evolved into a drag, Vidamma Farrell, finishing her sophomore year of high school, again became as restless as she had the previous four years. In spite of ample evidence of her eventual metamorphosis into a scholar of consequence, the upcoming end of the school year had become an extra-special time ever since her parents, but mostly her mother, and perhaps for the wrong reasons, had come to the understanding that it would be ethnically beneficial for Vidamma to spend part of the summer with her father. As she stood rigidly inside a quadratic equation and stared at a sky full of nimbusian elephants, Vidamma thought again of her father, Billy Farrell, in her mind a figure of considerable mythic qualities, whom she both admired and pitied once she got to know him, and decided that it was in everyone's best interest to help him make a reentry into more acceptable human society. She didn't meet her father until the age of twelve, when she learned that once upon a time her father had sat in the middle of a Vietnamese rice paddy, under a shower of steel,cradling the broken and forever useless body of her uncle, Joey Santiago of Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of New York City, whom she would never meet since time and space didn't allow for such stratagems. Billy Farrell had cried while he held the eviscerated corpse of his ace, his homeboy, his reefer-smoking main man. Such was the shock, that Billy didn't notice that the drizzle of steel, while it had barely touched his own head, had meticulously erased his catalogue of the musical techniques of Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, and other jazz pianists. However, even if that aspersion of steel had not removed from consciousness the complex knowledge of flatted sevenths, augmented ninths, intricate harmonic patterns, and improvisational virtuosity that Billy had at one time displayed, he would have been unable to perform adequately, he believed, his own renditions of such standards as "Moonlight in Vermont," "April in Paris," "Back Home Again in Indiana," or "Autumn in New York" not because he lacked a geographical metronome, but because that baptismal of steel had neatly severed, at the root, the middle and pinkie fingers of his right hand, rendering him an eight-fingered jazz pianist, a phenomenon more rare than an arctic orchid. As Billy recalled, the medics finally appeared. Making their way through the sticky heat and the soupy stirfry of growing rice, detached limbs, and involuntary bowel movements, and the monotonic keening of thousands of flies, the medics removed the lifeless body of Joey Santiago from Billy's semi-catatonic, eight-fingered, shock-induced clutches and placed it in a body bag. They then saw Billy's lacerated scalp and the empty places in his hand, shot morphine into him, and whisked him off in a medevac helicopter. At the hospital in Da Nang, while they shaved his skull as preparation for neurosurgical engineering, the doctors, after cleansing and disinfecting the wounds, sent Billy, by way of various anesthetics, into a never-never land of painless musings. They then stretched the torn and jagged epidermis of his right hand over the first knuckles of his middle and pinkie fingers and stitched them up. Not a minute elapsed before the surgeons addressed Billy's cranium. The shrapnel had removed one and a half centimeters of bone from the upper-left side of his head above the ear. After inserting a minute metal plate where the hole had been, the surgeons sewed up his scalp. Ironically, given Billy's preference in music, on certain ionospherically hospitable nights, the metal insertion picked up a country-music station in Wheeling, West Virginia, so that his battlefield nightmares were now accompanied by music more suitable to the soundtrack for a moonshiner and revenuer film starring Robert Mitchum and his sons. The doctors, having failed, in his view, to scoop up from that rice paddy the spilled Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner, Horace Silver, Dave Brubeck, et al., plus his personal repository of blues, ragtime, Dixieland, swing, bop, West Coast, and progressive solos of hundreds of musicians ranging from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Ornette Coleman, were left wondering why Billy said nothing but simply stared at the ceiling. He often held up his right hand, now bandaged against infection, and, within that mitt of gauze, attempted to wiggle his absent digits, which at one time, together with the perfectly matched fingers of his gifted left hand, had surrounded intricate melodies as would the hands of a child a delicate spring butterfly, admiring it briefly and then letting it go to watch it dance lepidopterally away. For eight months, first at the hospital in Vietnam, then one in Japan, and subsequently in the States, Billy Farrell sat and stared bleakly at his crab hand, not recognizing it as his. Doctors and counselors and chaplains came and went, but none of them apologized for their failure to retrieve the music from the rice paddy. Having lost, along with the spilled music, his temperament, inventiveness, and musical technique, Billy Farrell had only love left. Eventually he told everyone he was fine, thank you very much and God bless you. When they asked him where they should send his disability check he said please send it care of my grandpa, Buck Sanderson, in Yonkers, New York, the chaplain has the address.

As Vidamma grew up and learned that other girls were called Jane, Joan, Jean, Jeannette, Ginny, Ginger, and even Gloria, Carmen, Marma, Teresa, but not Vidamma, and if they had mothers who looked like her mother they had last names like Rivera, Rodrmguez, Vasquez, Lspez, but not Farrell, she demanded to know everything about her father. When her mother, Elsa, ignored her, brushing off her concerns as unimportant, she went to her grandmother, Ursula Santiago. All Grandma Ursula would say was that her father had been in the war with her uncle Joey. Her uncle had been killed and her father had been hurt. His name was Billy Farrell and he had blond hair and blue eyes and used to live in Yonkers. "How did they meet?" Vidamma had asked on one of those rare occasions when her mother brought her into the city and left her with her grandmother. "How? He and my mother, huh, g|elita?" Vidamma inquired, practically pinning her grandmother against the stove where she had been stirring a pot of red beans in sauce for the better part of an eternity. "You have to ask your mother that," Ursula said, in the accented English of the Island of Enchantment, Puerto Rico, tierra de mis amores, jardmn de flores donde yo nacm, linguistic cha-cha. "I'm sure she knows, mijita." "She won't tell me."

"She must have her reasons." So in the summer that she turned twelve, aware that in riding the train back and forth between Tarrytown and New York one of the stops was Yonkers, she created a plan. Having saved six months' of allowance, Vidamma set out to find Billy Farrell, going off one Saturday, ostensibly to visit the Guggenheim Museum with her friend from summer camp, thirteen-year-old Janet Shapiro, who lived on Sutton Place. Artfully coordinating her cover and promulgating the lie with the skill of a graduate of one of your best disinformation finishing schools, rather than making the complete journey to Grand Central Station she got off the train in Yonkers. Filled with trepidation but determined in her resolve, she went forward. Like some fear-maddened mammal, she burrowed into the telephone directory, digging down through the alphabet until she reached the required depth. Methodically, she copied the name, address, and telephone number of every Farrell in town. After an hour or so of changing dollar bills into dimes and making useless Saturday-afternoon telephone calls to unsuspecting Farrells, in which, by deepening her voice or holding a handkerchief over the instrument, she masqueraded immaturely as officials of governmental bureaus, banks, or insurance companies, Vidamma began to feel the frustration of the amateur sleuth and, overcome by her despondency, sat on the curb to ponder what she must next do. So overwhelmed by the desolation of defeat did she appear, that a policeman by the name of Arnold Tyson decided she must be a runaway and inquired as to her predicament. When she explained her quest, Officer Tyson, who had gone to high school with Billy, dutifully drove Vidamma in his patrol car across the bridge to see Maud Farrell, Billy's mother, who was also known as the big, good-looking blonde who tends bar at O'Hanlon's in Mount Vernon. "Mrs. Farrell, this little girl's looking for Billy," Officer Tyson said, urging Vidamma up on a barstool. "Says Billy's her father." "You want a ginger ale?" asked Maud Farrell. "No, thank you," Vidamma replied. "What's your name, darling?" Maud Farrell then said, scooping up ice cubes with a glass from the bin behind the bar. "Vidamma. Vidamma Farrell," said the little Spanish wisp with freckles on her nose as Maud later described Vidamma to her friend, Ruby Broadway, also known as the good-looking Negro woman who ran the house where firemen, policemen, and railroad men went when they grew tired of listening to their wives talking about coupons, color TVs, and new skin-care products. "And you know my son?" Maud said as she set a glass on the gleaming surface of the bar. "No, but I know he's my father. He and my uncle were in the war. My uncle died. Here's a picture." And from the large leather bag she carried slung over her shoulder as if she were a bona fide teenager, Vidamma produced the worn picture of Billy Farrell and Joey Santiago in Vietnam that she had discovered in one of her mother's trunks while Elsa was in the Bahamas with her stepfather two weeks prior. "Could be," Maud said, looking at the picture and then at Officer Tyson before pouring ginger ale into the glass. "As Irish a face as you'd want," she added as she scrutinized Vidamma's physiognomy. "Same shape mouth as Billy. Drink up, honey."

"No, thank you," Vidamma said. "Look, if I'm gonna be your grandmother, you better do as you're told," Maud said, depositing her formidable bosom on the bar and squinting her eyes like I Love Lucy on TV so that Vidamma was charmed into smiling. "It's free and it'll make your nose tickle." "Okay," Vidamma said, taking little sips and letting the bubbles strike her face. And so Maud Farrell became a grandmother to Vidamma and on Saturday afternoons when she was off from O'Hanlon's she fed Vidamma bologna sandwiches and ice-cold root beer and brought her carefully in touch with her lineage, explaining, through family anecdote, fable, and myth, that Billy had indeed been in the war and had suffered a life-threatening injury that had left him in many respects incapacitated, but not in that way, she said, meaning his capacity to reproduce, saying it not luridly but thankfully, so that huge maternal tears emerged from her big blue eyes and she hugged Vidamma to her, making the girl cry and laugh at the same time and say, "Grandma, you got mayonnaise on your cheek." "The Kid," Maud Farrell called him, telling Vidamma he had been so christened in his Yonkers-Mount Vernon boyhood for no apparent reason by his maternal grandfather, Buck Sanderson, of banjo-playing fame, of whom it was told-mostly by him-that he had played on Mississippi riverboats and knew a thousand-and-one tunes which he taught the boy from the time he was one and a half years and was labeled a musical genius, by the same Buck Sanderson, grandfather, who, after playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a Christmas xylophone had handed the infant Billy the mallet and the boy, not yet able to form coherent vocal sounds, had, without any hesitation, reproduced every note of the song flawlessly from "Mary had" to "sure to go." When everyone had applauded, Baby Billy looked at them totally surprised at their glee, and they swear to this day that he had a look that chided their naoveti, as if he knew there was little complexity to the tune. It turned out, Vidamma learned, that when Billy was released from the hospital, he'd flown from California to New York, staying with his mama's parents, listening to the two of them bickering about everything as he always had in his childhood. Between unbidden flashbacks of the war, Billy permitted his grandfather to teach him the guitar, letting the big old man hold him while he cried when he couldn't form a B7 even with his good hand. Somewhere in the distance of his personal history, in some placid place of guarded memory, he knew that at one time the chords poured into his mind fluidly, the music going directly to his left hand, that wonderful, rambling-and-walking left hand, chording, laying down the music as if it were a road filled with beautiful landscapes. Patiently urged by his Grandpa Buck, Billy persisted and after a while, when he knew twelve or so chords and could play and sing folk songs such as "The Fox" and "Go Tell Aunt Rhodie" together with some Leadbelly like "Easy Rider," or "John Henry," he called his mother and said he was going into the city, meaning Manhattan. Maud, with the concern only a mother could have, said that he should be careful and that if he was starting to get restless and in need of companionship, there were plenty of girls right in the neighborhood willing to douse his ardor, especially Margie Biancalana, the little Italian girl whose father owned the barbershop and who just last Saturday had said, "Hi, Mrs. Farrell, how's Billy?" Or maybe Adele Botnick, who was studying to be a doctor but always liked jazz and had been asking for him. So Maud, feeling foolish for bringing up the subject, went on to say that he was welcome to use her apartment while she was at O'Hanlon's during the day, as long as he changed the sheets and straightened up after he was finished, because she sometimes got the same way and had men friends because she was still a relatively young woman, and that she hoped that he didn't think it was because she hadn't loved his father-may he rest in peace-because she had and still did, or that he wasn't angry now because she was discussing adult matters. "Naw, Ma," he said. "It's nothing like that. Thanks, anyway. Don't worry." "That's what you told me last time, you big jerk," big, good-looking Maud said, acting like a mother. " 'I'll be all right,' you said, and they shot you full of holes, like they did your father in Harlem, the spic bastards."



Continues...

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Excerpted from No Matter How Much You Promise by Edgardo Vega Yunque Copyright © 2004 by Edgardo Vega Yunque. Excerpted by permission.
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