As the first Latino novelist to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Oscar Hijuelos is the best known of an increasing group of American Hispanic writers to reach a broad American audience. Born in New York on 24 August 1951 of Cuban parents, Hijuelos writes only in English. Although Cuban culture is his narrative point of departure, the voice that speaks in his novels, which may be close to Hijuelos himself, is that of a second-generation Cuban-American, someone whose ties to Cuban culture are becoming increasingly distant. Cuba provides Hijuelos with a subject, but it is not constitutive of his writerly stance, his choice of language, or his audience. Even when Hijuelos draws extensively on Spanish-American material, he weaves it into a work whose fabric is resolutely Anglocentric. Hijuelos pays tribute to things Cuban even as he bids them farewell. His work is a complex and moving valedictory to the...