[Macho Camacho's Beat] is lively and admirable, a good first novel by an industrious and talented writer. (p. 280)

[Freed from] ethnic cheerleaders and translation-workshop booers, Macho Camacho's Beat prances into the cosmopolitan form of the city-in-a-day book invented and patented in English by James Joyce, that other colonial writer, and delicately pirated by Virginia Woolf, that other oppressed individual. Sánchez swaggers beyond those two in submerging his characters in a swarming choreography of people, motifs, and expressions, so that his novel is almost all corps, no principal dancers, even though there are a few identifiable performers, like the Mother who leaves her idiot baby out in the tropical sun, Senator Vincente Reinosa, whose son Benny conducts a teenager's hot romance with his Ferrari, which crashes the book, expectedly, into a liebestodt of post-Faulknerian-a-la-Hitchcock "brains splattered on the door of the Ferrari and … some eyes plopped in the...