BookBrowse Reviews Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez

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An undergraduate art history student researches the life of a Cuban American artist whose story strangely parallels her own.

Brooklyn-based novelist Xochitl Gonzalez is an inspiring writer to follow. At forty, she decided to pivot in her career and pursue a lifelong dream of writing fiction. She enrolled in the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop and in 2021 received an MFA. A year later, her debut novel Olga Dies Dreaming was published and quickly hit the NYT bestseller list. In that remarkable novel, Gonzalez managed to combine an approachable, entertaining family story with powerful considerations of identity, poverty, race, capitalism, corruption, love, honor, elite privilege, feminism, Puerto Rico and its history and politics.

Now, in her second novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, readers are in for another thrilling ride. Again, Gonzalez delivers a satisfying, propulsive story as she relates the sometimes-parallel experiences faced by two Latina women who, a decade apart, must each navigate elitist, alien environments. As her characters confront the mores and expectations of the New York art world and Ivy League academia, Gonzalez points a high beam into the shadows to locate the traps of racism, sexism and class biases that undercut her main characters at every turn. In so doing, she once again deftly incorporates into her fiction the piercing social critique that readers have come to admire.

The book opens in the mid-1980s. Up-and-coming Cuban American artist Anita de Monte is attending a crowded art-world party. De Monte feels elated, hardly even bothered that her faithless, superstar husband, sculptor Jack Martin, is off flirting with a young acolyte. Dancing the night away in a silver sequined dress, Anita nurses the thrilling knowledge that she has finally landed a solo exhibition in Rome at a prestigious gallery. But in only a few hours, Anita de Monte will be killed—hurtled out of an apartment window during a venomous argument with Jack.

Flash forward a decade. Raquel Toro is one of two non-white undergraduates in Brown University's art history department, and although she knows she is smart and ambitious, she still grapples with the sense of being on a completely different frequency from most of her cohort and professors. As she enters her senior year, Raquel must choose her graduation thesis topic, a choice complicated by others hoping to influence her path. Must she follow the advice of her paternalistic advisor and write her thesis on the sculptor Jack Martin? When Raquel learns the full story about the life of vanished artist Anita de Monte, she faces the uncomfortable realization that the women artists who speak to her experience rarely make it on to university art history syllabi. Things grow more complicated yet when handsome artist Nick Fitzsimmons turns his attention to her; how much of herself will Raquel need to cede in order to meet his possessive and needy demands in their relationship?

The character of Anita de Monte—whose biography and artwork are closely based on the artist (note the near anagram) Ana Mendieta (see Beyond the Book)—displays a high-octane, intense personality, and the chapters focused on her story really shine. Things begin to get a little supernatural midway through—perhaps not surprising when one of a novel's first-person narrators is no longer living—and here I did wonder where the author was heading. The author kept a firm hand on the tiller, however, creating in Anita a character so clearly drawn that it somehow felt plausible that her voice might reach beyond the grave. So, my advice is simple: buckle up and prepare for a bit of fictional turbulence. Gonzalez has fashioned a memorable character in Anita, a thrilling presence who nonetheless stays within the novel's sometimes wacky boundaries.

Gonzalez utilizes a first-person point of view as Anita and Raquel alternate telling their stories. Although Raquel's chapters fall more squarely within a classic narrative arc, and her milder voice cannot match Anita's powerful personality and spirit, her steps towards developing her own agency and confidence in the face of microaggressions and manipulations ground the novel, and will be particularly compelling to many readers.

In the end, Gonzalez's arrows all hit their targets—the elite worlds of academia and the fine arts, racism, misogyny, gaslighting, power dynamics—with a full, furious force. That said, the book is not without its flaws. Powerful convictions can at times turn the baddies into straw men. Several chapters written from Anita's husband's egocentric perspective fell flat for me, although they successfully advance the plot. A pivotal scene involving Raquel's cruel hazing from jealous fellow female art students also felt a bit improbable, yet is perhaps only one short step away from the less clearly expressed bullying that happens in life all the time.

Overall, this is a rollicking and insightful read, and I heartily recommend it.

This review first ran in the May 1, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.