Critical Overview
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love was a popular and critical success as soon as it was first published in 1989. It was heavily promoted by its publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux, a fact that Nicholas Kanellos made note of in his review for The American Review: “a 40,000 copy first hardcover printing, a $50,000 national marketing campaign, 100% national co-op advertising, rights sold in advance to England, France, Finland, Germany, Holland and Italy, extensive exposure at the American Booksellers Association. . .” Kanellos went on to observe that this extensive promotion “has paid off, with glowing reviews in all the right places, from Time and The New York Times to Publishers Weekly and Kirkus; and the first Pulitzer prize for fiction to a Latino. And,” he added, “The Mambo Kings is worth it. This is the best Hispanic book ever published by a large commercial press.”
While the book is generally praised, critics have also found fault with it. Critical difference regarding the book’s quality have generally centered around two subjects: Hijuelos’s success in rendering the central character, Cesar Castillo, as a rounded and believable human, and the book’s loose, repetitive, almost plotless structure. Both views have supporters and detractors. In the Time magazine review that Kanellos mentioned, for instance, R. Z. Sheppard noted that Cesar’s “flamboyant plumage and mating behaviors seem dated and may not appeal to readers who now find machismo to be a dirty word.” But Sheppard went on to dispute that charge: “Hijuelos deflects this prejudice with sensitivity and a charged style that elevates stereotype into character.” Cathleen McGuigan made nearly the same point in Newsweek when she noted that Cesar “is a classic portrait of machismo,” and then explained that the book is so well written that the familiarity of the character type does not diminish it: “Fortunately Hijuelos has a tender touch with his characters, and The Listener. Hornby’s review, “Cuban Heels,” proposed that The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is actually about three main characters: “Nestor, Cesar and Cesar’s penis.” About the last, he wrote, “Its exploits are detailed with alarmingly loving care and though there are hints that Hijuelos has an ironic perspective on all this machismo, they come none too frequently.”
Hornby also brought up Hijuelos’s rambling, formless method of presenting the story. “Its other major disadvantage is that it is wildly underedited,” he wrote, “at just over 400 pages one is left with the feeling that there is a great short story in here struggling to get undressed.” The same criticism came from Sven Birkerts, who, reviewing Hijuelos’s follow-up book (The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien) for The New Republic, commented that The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love had been “overweight by at least 100 pages.” Acknowledging the absence of plot, Birkerts opined that “the true glory of the book was its prose, which was energetic, detailed, able to modulate from the silky to the percussive in the space of a line.” Margo Jefferson noted the same effect in The New York Times Book Review: she praised Hijuelos’s prose with the observation that the book “alternates crisp narrative with opulent musings—the language of everyday and the language of longing.” Immediately following this praise, though, she wrote, “When Mr. Hijuelos falters, as from time to time he does, it’s through an excess of selfconsciousness: he strives too hard for an allencompassing description or grows distant and dutiful in an effort to get period details just right.”
Several reviewers compared the novel’s twisted, indirect form to the style of...
(This entire section contains 734 words.)
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music that is its focus. In “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” her review inNewsweek, McGuigan admitted that “The novel isn’t conventionally plotted; it slides back and forth in time and meanders into dreams and fantasies.” She found this to be an asset: “Like an album of mambo tunes, some of the sequences begin to sound alike, but the rhythms and colors are hard to resist.” Hornby, too, took note of the similarities between the prose style and the Castillo brothers’ profession. “Hijuelos seems to be trying to capture at great length the rhythms and resonances of the music in the writing,” he pointed out. He, however, found this “improvisational” narrative theory easy to resist: “in practice the effect is more Black Sabbath than Charlie Parker, and phrases and incidents are repeated over and over without any discernible modulation.”