The study guide uses the following edition: Goldman, Francisco. Monkey Boy. Grove Press, 2021.

The novel begins with journalist Frank Goldberg leaving New York to take the train back home to Boston. Frank uses the long ride to muse on his complicated relationship with his family. His Guatemalan-born mother, Yolanda, now struggling with dementia in a Boston area care facility, became a college Spanish professor and a community leader for Latin American activism. His father, Bert, a first-generation Ukrainian Jew, dreamed of being a doctor. Denied admission to medical schools because he was Jewish, he earned a degree in civil engineering and worked for decades designing artificial teeth before his death a few years earlier at the age of 93. Frank’s celebrity rests on a series of investigative articles and a book he published about the nearly forty years of civil war in Guatemala and the murder there of a popular anti-government activist bishop. Indeed, Frank left his home in Mexico City for New York just a few months earlier over threats against his life because his exposé raised questions about the involvement of a general now running for Guatemala’s presidency. Frank heads to Boston to visit his mother, have dinner with an old high school flame, and have an interview about the general and conditions in Central America. He is finishing a novel, a fictional biography of José Marti (1853-1895), a Cuban poet revered as one of his country’s most important patriots.

Approaching 50, Frank still struggles with dark memories of his violent father. He has found relationships difficult to sustain. He has never married and has no children. Given his peripatetic lifestyle, Frank’s most memorable relationships, and he recalls many of them over the weekend, barely last five years. He is currently involved with Lulú Lopez, a fun-loving first-generation Mexican immigrant living in Brooklyn whom he met conducting one of his night classes on story writing. Lulú is half his age, a nanny who dreams of being a civil engineer. Given his “halfie” identity, half Russian, half Guatemalan, half Jewish, half Catholic, half American, half immigrant, Frank sorts through painful memories of growing up in one of Boston’s white neighborhoods where he was bullied because of his mixed heritage. School chums dubbed him Monkey Boy. His family, his parents and his younger sister, Lexi, was financially secure, able to bring a succession of nannies, all refugees from war-torn Guatemala. Academically indifferent but a voracious reader, Frank early on showed promise in his writing classes and used that talent, and his passion for words and his gift for storytelling, as a springboard first to college and then to a lucrative career as a journalist based in Central America.

The weekend visit gives Frank a chance to have dinner with Mariana Lucas, a girlfriend who witnessed and shared the routine humiliations from the kids in high school. She is now a powerful divorce attorney. In addition, he meets with María Xum and with Feli, who were among the family’s most devoted and engaged nannies. In these meetings, Frank begins to realize the depth of his father’s violence and, particularly, its impact on his mother. The father’s death had not exorcized the man’s menacing presence in his family’s emotional life. Frank is a loner who lives apart, aloof, emotionally distanced from family and lovers, and relying on irony and caustic wit to mask his sadness. His sister, once a gifted violinist, is perpetually in therapy, struggling with depression. She never married and uses her spacious home in New Bedford to help a succession of Central American refugee children. Over the weekend, Frank remembers the intensity of his father’s beatings and how scared he always felt. What he learns is more disturbing. He learns how his father had beaten his mother as well. Frank knew the marriage was stormy. His mother took him to live for a time in Guatemala where she became involved in the fledgling underground movement to help restore democracy to the beleaguered country.

Over the weekend, Frank visits twice with his mother at Green Meadows, a care facility outside Boston. Over their usual game of Scrabble, Frank gently asks his mother about the past, her family and her marriage. In and out of clarity and lucidity, Mamita, in the course of the conversation, confirms it was during the time in Guatemala that she had a passionate affair with a charismatic Mexican freedom fighter named Rene (or maybe Miguel) who later followed her to Boston where she ended the affair. In the late hours of the weekend, Frank visits the niece of a family friend, a gay painter who created a stunning oil portrait of his mother when she was pregnant with Frank. For Frank, the weekend gives him the opportunity to confront his past. As a journalist in Central America and as a survivor of parent abuse, Frank fears he has developed a hard heart, a guarded defensive strategy against a world that seemed threatening, violent, and brutal. In every visit, every encounter, he listens to heartfelt stories his friends and family share. He learns about the tangled roots of his own family with its rich cultural diversity, and he revisits the impact of witnessing violence first in his home, then at school, and later in the genocide of war-torn Guatemala. As Frank prepares to return to New York at weekend’s end, he understands that the heart is both fragile and resilient and that it is time now for him to stop hiding from his past and to risk living.