The best of the Latins are pretty solidly in the modernist tradition,… but for the most part without the sterility that "modernist" has come to connote in Europe and North America. We have learned to expect certain other, better things from Latin American fiction: wit, energy, a lively cynicism, freedom from literary dogma, an original vision, innovation in form, vivid characters and a true love of language (as opposed to mere literary crossword-puzzle making). In all of those things, Macho Camacho's Beat is Latin American. And delightfully so.

To explain the plot of Sánchez's novel is to explain the least about it. In one sense, as in Tristram Shandy or Mrs. Dalloway, nothing really happens. Poor Tristam Shandy never gets off his stair landing, Woolf's airplane merely passes over and Sánchez's characters never get unstuck from "traffic jams" of one sort or another. (p. 642)

What "happens," chiefly, is characters, humor, pathos, satire and language—language's rhythms, its jokes, its silliness, its pretensions, its nonsense that parades as sense. The book is Macho Camacho's beat. The language of its telling is as energetic and simultaneously as vulgar as either the guaracha or the culture that spawned it. Sánchez plops us into the linguistic world of Bottom and his players, and refuses to let us out. That world's style moves from the jive talk of the streets to the banality of advertising jingles, to the banality of political rhetoric, to the banality of academese, to the Mohammed Aliish doggerel of pop salsa songs, all in the best mock-epic tradition. And in this, also, the novel is Latin American. While it mocks, it is a love song, too. Sánchez the intellectual and literature professor is bound to be appalled at the bastardized, Americanized, corrupt society that surrounds him. Yet, as an artist, he is fascinated by it, in love with the rich material.

And, ultimately, the book does that most difficult of things for a novel to do. It creates, movingly and vividly, a particular time, a particular place and the people who inhabit that time and place. Other things may be asked of a book before it can be called truly great, but if it does not do those basic things well, it has not even a shot at greatness.

Macho Camacho's Beat is not without flaws. At times the rhetoric becomes merely decorative or cute, and thus tedious; at times the jokes become too "in"; at times the author lets the intellectual get the better of the artist. When that happens, the persona, voice and tone all go out the window to make room for the obligatory Latin diatribe against the soulless tyranny of the bourgeoisie (I oppose not the sentiment of the diatribe but its sentimentality). But overall, those flaws are anomalies, stones in a tumbling verbal stream. (pp. 642-43)

[All in all], Macho Camacho's Beat is wonderfully full of life. And not just a kind of life that is intelligible only to a Latin or Puerto Rican audience…. The voices that sing are eminently human, are clearly recognizable, are ours, too. And if the sound of the Latin American fiction "boom" seems to some to be fading, let them listen again. The dynamite is still going off. (p. 644)