Come Together, Fall Apart
By Cristina Henriquez

Reviewed by Emberly Nesbitt

A collection of stories and a novella by first-time writer Cristina Henríquez, Come Together, Fall Apart, like Junot Diaz’s excellent Drown, captures a Spanish-language landscape of young people breaking away. Henríquez explores the beaches, cities, and rainforests of Panama. The narrators are both young men and women, but the pull in the stories is towards the women, who invariably have distant fathers and vigilant mothers, one with “a body like a big yam – everything fleshy and sweet.” The collection focuses on the ache of upheaval – of domestic arrangements, the economy, the ousting of Manuel Noriega. Each story clacks tightly against the next, like beads on a string, to reveal the inner lives of the characters as well as the shifting culture of a country in transition.

In the first story “Yanina,” a young man tries to decide if he should marry the girlfriend who has already proposed to him forty-five times. “Ashes” introduces a wonderfully complex and reserved young woman with a low-wage job at the Casa de la Carne; she is a woman who “knows her depths” and who is broken open by her mother’s death. Henríquez states emotional truths with simplicity and there is comfort and even companionship in the way she so carefully attends to small shifts in the characters’ desires in both of these stories. The reserved woman in “Ashes” “always thought there was something special between my mother and me. Like she was somehow more mine… But maybe all children feel that – a sovereignty over the parent they love best.” Parents and lovers retain the power to wound, but always with an excess of love.

“Drive,” a story about a young woman who works in a department store in Panama City (where they haven’t sold an appliance in seventeen days), who gets pregnant by her drug-dealing boyfriend, makes the delightfully reductive case that “There are two ways you can go in this life: Either a whole family, twenty people or whatever, stick together and live all in one house like a big pod, or else everyone’s spread all over, like seeds, and you each replant yourself and make a new life on your own.” Change pushes the woman both literally and figuratively away from what she knows, just as new highways are built that direct tourists away from the center of Panama City, away from what’s real, highways where, she says, “the thought of shooting around in a car that fast scares the shit out of everyone” and no one “is going to pay to drive on a stupid highway when the other roads are free.” In this story, sex and drugs are not an escape, but a way of finding some kind of center. As a woman in another story, “Chasing Birds,” puts it, “Here the city felt boundless around her. As if she were no more than a small crumb in the center of it and it ebbed in concentric circles around her and around her, endlessly outward. It seemed so easy to lose the sense of your place in the world entirely.”

The concluding novella, from which the collection draws its title, takes place in December of 1989 and January1990, as a tense Panama witnesses the removal by U.S. troops of dictator Manuel Noriega. Narrated by fifteen year old Ramón, we follow one family forced from the modest home generations of their families have rented, made to move out by a construction company clearing the way for high-rises. The narrative allows the larger situation, the bombing, the food shortage, and the violence in the streets, to creep around the corners and for once in a Henríquez tale, the more interesting human drama is not the plot but the convincing, detailed, sensory history lesson about the recent past.