The Inexplicable Logic Of My Life

by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Hardcover, 2017

Status

Available

Call number

PZ7.S1273 I54 2017

Genres

Collection

Dennis R. Neill Equality Center

Publication

Clarion Books (2017), 464 pages

Description

Young Adult Fiction. Young Adult Literature. HTML: A "mesmerizing, poetic exploration of family, friendship, love and loss" from the acclaimed author of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. (New York Times Book Review) Sal used to know his place with his adoptive gay father, their loving Mexican American family, and his best friend, Samantha. But it's senior year, and suddenly Sal is throwing punches, questioning everything, and realizing he no longer knows himself. If Sal's not who he thought he was, who is he? This humor-infused, warmly humane look at universal questions of belonging is a triumph..

User reviews

LibraryThing member bookwren

The best book on teen and family relationships that I've ever read. So much wisdom, kindness, humor, and beautiful writing. I want to read it again and underline favorite passages, because I couldn't stop long enough on the first reading as I was so caught up in the lives of the characters, their

heartaches and joys.

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9 more

LibraryThing member lilibrarian

Salvador is a 'gringo' adopted by a gay Mexican-American father after his mother died when he was 3-years-old. He is brought up in a warm loving environment. Samantha, Sal's friend, seems to have a taste for bad boys and lives with her mother who drinks. Fito's family is just dysfunctional; his mom

is a drug addict. They all need to adjust their definitions of family and loss.

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LibraryThing member TexasBookLover

YA FICTION
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
Clarion Books
Hardcover, 978-0-5445-8650-5, (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 464 pgs., $17.99
March 7, 2017

“just because my love isn’t perfect doesn’t mean I don’t love you”

Seventeen-year-old

Salvador “Sally” Silva likes his life. What he doesn’t like is change. Beginning his senior year at El Paso High School, Sally has a great relationship with Vicente, his adoptive father; a steadfast best friend of many years, Samantha “Sammy” Diaz; and a loving extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and his grandmother Mima. But when Sally, an easygoing guy with “a control thing over [himself]” who prefers “keeping it calm,” gets into a fistfight on the first day of school, he begins to wonder about his “bio father” for the first time, and doubting that he really knows himself at all. “Maybe the kind of guy I was was like someone I didn’t know,” Sally thinks. “You know, the guy I’d never met whose genes I had.” Then Sally’s Mima gets sick, his father’s former boyfriend returns, and his friends’ lives are turned upside down, forcing Sally to confront impending adulthood and question what it means to be a man.

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life is the new young-adult novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This is a heartwarming coming-of-age story in which Sáenz inhabits Sally on the cusp of “life beginning,” bringing his first-person narration uncannily alive in beautifully rendered relationships.

Sally wants the human heart to make rational sense, but he and his friends learn that there are as many ways of loving as there are people on the planet. Mima feeds people; Vicente loves his sports-loving brothers by reading the sports pages of the newspaper so he can have a conversation with them; Uncle Mickey loves by slipping money into the hands of his nieces and nephews. Sally discovers “love is difficult and complicated,” and that love, not blood, creates a family.

These characters are sharply delineated individuals. Sammy is beautiful, smart, ambitious, and emotionally volatile. “She could be a storm. But she could be a soft candle lighting up a dark room.” Vicente is a Columbia-educated painter and professor of art, a gay Mexican American who loves art because “it civilized the world.” Fito is an “intellectual” who ends every other sentence with “and shit,” who walks “like a coyote looking for food” and whose mother barters her Lone Star card for meth.

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life is a long book, but a quick read; it just flows. Language and the magic of words are important to these characters, and Sáenz’s choices are precise. His teenage dialogue sounds authentic, especially the “verbal volleyball” between Sally and Sammy. Happily, El Paso is a presence in this story. “I like that you could see and smell the border in the air and on the streets,” Sally says, “and in the talk of the few people we passed who spoke the special kind of language that wasn’t really Spanish and wasn’t really English.”

I will miss these characters. To paraphrase Sally, I like who these kids are becoming. Sáenz has done the thing that is the reason for fiction.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.

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LibraryThing member nbmars

This novel for young adults is chock full of “issues” but it seems realistic enough. The main protagonist is a Caucasian teenager named Sally (Salvador) Silva, raised by a Mexican-American family, who is experiencing changes in himself he doesn’t understand. He is 17, and as the story begins,

it is the first day of his senior year at high school in El Paso, Texas.

After his mother died of cancer when Sally was still a toddler, he was adopted by Vincente, a (Mexican) gay artist, whose gender identification brings out the bullies against Sally at school. Sally’s female best friend Sam (note the gender reversal of the names) has a drug-addicted mother, so she practically lives at Sally’s house. His male best friend Fito has “the most screwed-up family on planet Earth,” and he too ends up needing a place to live. Vincente, a generous and compassionate guy who “could have been a counselor” ends up fathering these three seventeen-year-olds.

Turmoil ensues when Sally finds out his beloved grandmother Mima is dying of cancer; Sam almost gets raped by a date; and an old boyfriend shows up in Vincente’s life. On top of all of this, Vincente picks this time to give Sally a letter his mother left for him before she died. Sally is afraid to open it. All of the sudden Sally, formerly a mild-mannered, good-hearted kid, is consumed by fear and anger over all these disruptions in his life, and begins lashing out with his fists.

For the first time, Sally starts to wonder about his biological father. What was hiding inside him? Did he inherit pugilistic tendencies from him? “Maybe the kind of guy I was, well, maybe I was like someone I didn’t know. You know, the guy I’d never met whose genes I had.”

As Sally obsesses over this, Sam and Fito go through their own family crises, and all the kids have self-esteem problems and need support. Vincente’s family, as near to saintly as any family can be, provides it. As they keep telling all of the kids, it’s not where you came from that matters, it is where you are going.

Eventually, Sally comes has the realization that anger didn’t make him a “bad boy” - it just made him human:

“There was nothing wrong with getting angry. It was what you did with that anger that mattered. All this time I’d been so scared that I was going to turn out to be like a biological father I’d never met. I’d underestimated myself. In the end, wasn’t it up to me to choose? Didn’t we all grow up to be the kind of men we wanted to become?”

[Um, no, not necessarily. And how did he come to this epiphany? It seems the opposite of what he might have concluded when he finally found out about his biological father.] But in any event, Sally recognizes that his “real” father is the one who raised him, and that’s the only one he has to worry about. And obviously he could have no better role model, since the guy is universally considered to be just about perfect.

Discussion: Generally in order to get absorbed in a book, I don’t need it to tell a story from the perspective of the same race or culture I am from, or by a character who is the same age, gender and/or has the same gender preference. But I had trouble relating to this story. My best guess as to why is the author’s writing style, which is simplistic (albeit in a somewhat poetic way), and doesn’t reveal much “underneath” the characters.

Sally has a great heart, and is generous in spirit, but isn’t all that bright or sophisticated. He keeps saying he feels he acts more like a little boy than a man, and I have to say I felt the same about him. There is no doubt he is a good boy, but his character just seemed off to me since he was, after all, 17. Even his father talks to him as if he were much younger. And with all his wondering about who he was and why he acted the way he did, he didn’t gain much insight about it, and I didn’t get much either.

There are a number of good messages in this book, but I didn’t feel their emotional heft. There are also some issues unresolved at the end, but we are left with the idea that all the characters are now on the right track, and learning to deal with the inevitable losses of life that ultimately cannot be controlled. Rather, Sally decides, there is “an inexplicable logic” to life, which can be not only terrible but beautiful.

Evaluation: This is probably meant to be a coming-of-age story, but the lack of depth of the narration just didn’t fill in the blanks for me too satisfactorily. “Philosophical” questions get resolved sort of by fiat by the narrator rather than by an evolutionary process evident to the reader (or to this reader, at least). But I really liked some aspects of the book, such as the celebration of Mexican-American culture, and the loving portrayal of a family headed by a gay man.

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LibraryThing member Salsabrarian

Narrated by Robbie Daymond. As Sal(vador) and his best friend Sam(antha) begin their senior year of high school, Sal has the feeling that things are going to change, when he would much rather have things stay the same. Sam would call it a premonition. But Sal can’t shake the feeling and as the

year progresses, events bear him out: He finds himself getting into fights easily out of loyalty to his friends and family. His beloved grandmother Mima’s cancer has returned. Sal begins to wonder about his biological father and if his recent fights have something to do with his nature. His father Vicente’s ex-boyfriend is back in the picture. Sam’s mother dies. For Sal, it is a hard year of loss, fear and introspection. But through it all, love carries him: love from his father, Sam, his Mima, aunts and uncles, and Fito. Daymond handles this introspective story with gentle care, portraying the warm intimacy of Sam and Sal’s friendship (nice to see a boy/girl friendship portrayed without complications). Gentle pacing reflects Sal’s thoughtfulness, the concerns preoccupying him, the affectionate relationships with his father and Mima.

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LibraryThing member m_mozeleski

Raw but lovely, this is a story of family being what you make it, more than family being blood ties. Adopted kids, lost and orphaned kids, and kids who lose their parent make up our main cast.

There was a liiitle sugarcoating of things, I think, but it was subtle enough to be passable. A few too

many coincedences and a few too much skating past the law. But it was, overall, a fantastic book and I highly recommend it!

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LibraryThing member Paul-the-well-read

Another Wonderful Book

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life is moving at times, sad at others, frequently funny, incredibly honest and believable and fully demonstrates the talents of an author who understands his characters. Throughout this book, the redemptive power of love flows, seeping into the

lives of others whose only choice is then to pass it along. In this book, there are characters who have experienced love their whole lives, others who should have been loved, but who were mistreated by those who should have loved them, and others wounded and damaged by abuse. The father of the central character, a gay man, took in everyone who was hungry for love and shared his own, demonstrating that “love is only love when you give it away, and that in giving love both the lover and the beloved are enriched.
I usually give my star ratings much more because of the quality of the writing than for the excellence of the story line. In this case, the book would receive high ratings by any measure.
It is the second book by Benjamin Saenz that I’ve read, a small inroad into the number of them that I hope to read.

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LibraryThing member Paul-the-well-read

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LibraryThing member m.belljackson

With encompassing Love and Family hosted by Vicente, Sal, Sam, and Fito search for what can make sense in their lives and futures.

Opening chapter is pretty amazing lead in...

While drawn to both Sal and Vicente, the low-driving subplot of not opening the letter goes on way too long.

LibraryThing member indygo88

Salvadore ("Sal") is just beginning his senior year of high school. He's typically been a pretty grounded guy and lives a good life. He lives with his single gay father, he's got a wonderful Mexican-American extended family (he's especially close to his grandmother), and he's got his best friend

and partner-in-crime Samantha ("Sam"). But for some reason this year feels different -- he's questioning his place in his family and wonders why he's feeling so restless.

This is mostly a coming-of-age novel within the span of less than a year. On the one hand, not a lot happens in this novel. But on the other hand, a lot happens in this novel. And at its core, it's a feel-good story, despite the fact that a lot of bad things occur. I have mixed feelings. I liked the character development -- each character had his/her own unique voice. In some ways they were very authentic, but in other ways, they seemed almost too good to be truly realistic in today's world, sadly. Sal's father was awesome, but I kept thinking to myself, "Is this guy for real?" It was mostly a good story, geared toward a young adult audience.

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