Angelo R. Lacuesta’s first novel is a deeply personal story that spans decades of changes—political, social, economic, technological—in the Philippines
Does anybody really grow up? Or is adulthood simply youth in perspective, the same person, only with more time, with more resources, with more power, as well as more opportunities to add, subtract, multiply, divide, validate, or negate all the given elements—experiences, dreams, memories, visions—of life as they occur?
In the first sentence of Joy, the initial foray of Angelo R. Lacuesta, or Sarge, into long-form fiction, I found myself.
I was that eight-year-old kid whose father carried on his shoulders, “so I could see over the tops of people’s heads from the sidewalk right across the upper balcony of one of Cubao’s upscale department stores, where they always held a Christmas show.”
As it was for the character of Sarge’s fiction, every year on my father’s shoulders was a big event in my childhood, every year “more outlandish than the previous one,” or so because my senses were riper, my memory sharper. “We never missed a season until we stopped going. I just can’t tell you the exact year when we came for the very last time, but it was probably just when I had grown big enough and my father’s bony, narrow shoulders couldn’t bear my weight anymore,” so writes Sarge, but I might as well have been the one telling the story.
Joy spans the lifetime of a boy becoming a man. It’s going every which way but linear, in the way that life as we live it unfolds, triggered by memories, seduced by dreams, past and future colliding to push the present forward or to pull it back.
Its protagonist, Lucas Letrero, named deliberately after the author’s son, strikes me as a product of his time, growing up, like I did, in the 1970s and early 1980s in Manila, described as much by the narrator’s sensibilities as by a smattering of the proper nouns, along with the whole period milieu they stood for. Like time carved on cave walls or trapped in amber, the words Makati Medical Center (as the only place good enough to give birth in for an upper class or upper middle class Manileña), Student Canteen, Muhammad Ali, and Voltes V. Even some of the common nouns, like long-distance calls and pizza pie, hark back to days long gone.
“I’ve had many readers from generations X and Y respond to that nostalgic part of Joy,” Sarge tells me, “and many other readers resonating with the part of the novel that is situated in contemporary times. So I’ve been surprised to find out how it’s a different novel for every type of reader.”
Time moves in Joy, albeit in circles, yet eventually, as you get deeper into the novel, the time-trapped words, like Toyota Crown and Manila Garden Hotel and even smoking in enclosed spaces, such as a recording booth, fall by the wayside, giving way to YouTube, social media influencers, digital crowdsourcing, sexting, and VCs.
We try to escape the humdrum of our lives in fiction yet, in fiction, no matter how out of time or out of this world, we often find ourselves.
Sarge agrees. “Fiction has always been about reality,” he says. “The idea of escape in fiction is, to me, a trip to one’s suspended interior world. In other words, there is no escape from our own time and our own life. We must live through it, as the characters in Joy did—and as I did, in my own real way, through their lives and their own times.”
Reading Joy to me, given that Sarge and I are more or less the same age, is a memory refresher. It takes me back to the neighborhood of my childhood in suburban Manila described in the novel as composed of “bungalows and up-and-down apartments loosely strung together across the unfinished houses and the unbought lots overrun with cogon grass in our predetermined section of our lower middle-class district.”
Among the big themes of Joy is the idea of identity and representation and also the big changes that have had great impact on them. “Anyone, such as you and I, who has gone through this great digital shift can attest to how much it has changed our idea of ourselves.”
For better? Or for worse? I ask the author and he says, “I don’t know if I believe in ‘better’ or ‘worse’ in the grand scheme of things. And it’s not in a ‘things change, things stay the same’ kind of way. The human situation has always been fluid and fractured. While it’s clear that we can always make things better for ourselves, whether we mean our individual selves or the planet we live on, it is also clear that human nature will always play a part in making things worse.”
Joy is a deeply personal story about estrangement and intimacy. It spans decades of changes—political, social, economic, technological—though the changes are kept in the background, mostly only implied. It is in experiences so personal that the grander tapestry of issues confronting nationhood and identity is reflected. “Being true to one’s characters is part of the demands of writing, and for me, the characters in Joy lead very personal lives that reflect what I feel is a real middle-class experience of these great themes—which exist as a natural backdrop,” Sarge explains. “Of course, this is a critique of the middle class, which is why the point of view at certain points breaks away to something completely off-camera, as it were, to sordid or ultraviolent scenes, events that are completely out of the middle class experience. Who is seeing and writing these scenes? Not the characters, but the author. This was a narrative risk I took, and up to now I don’t know if it works. But all told, I wanted it to form a quiet explanation of our split social reality.”
‘This is why the title came so easily to me. It’s a feeling, a spirit, a moment that only Filipinos can really know and understand and aspire to.’
This split social reality, as captured in Joy, is no more apparent in the resilience for which the Filipino is acclaimed all over the world, especially by themselves. “Joy is completely Filipino, This is why the title came so easily to me. It’s a feeling, a spirit, a moment that only Filipinos can really know and understand and aspire to. Call it sad joy or reckless joy or miserable joy—it is full-on Pinoy joy.”
Yes, that’s true: Rain or shine, come hell or high water, Ondoy or Yolanda, even with our politicians mocking us, exploiting us, screwing us over, we always find joy somehow. Anything goes or—as the absent father of Joy’s narrator would say using a word that now means the same thing as it did in defunct 1970s Tagalog—maskipaps.
Joy: A Novel by Angelo R. Lacuesta, published by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia (SEA), is available at bit.ly/ShopGoodIntentions or at favorite bookstores.