Prose Book Prize Awardee

Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son is a short novel that packs a wallop, like a boxer who strikes hard in the first line and doesn't let up with unexpected punches. As in another memorable Asian American novel that features boxing, Milton Murayama's All I Asking For Is My Body, this is an intense local story from the perspective of a young adolescent protagonist, a perspective that is subtly shaded by a tone of irony, lament, and wistfulness that seems as if it comes from the protagonist's "older" self looking back on his youth. As in Murayama's novel, this narrative's main achievement is how it conveys all of this young man's emotional complexities in spare but powerful prose, and how it ties those complexities to social conditions. Like the archangel whose name he shares, the protagonist Gabriel is a messenger, albeit an unwitting one, for the agents of contemporary suburban unrest. The "inner city" downtown core is most typically L.A.'s most sensationalized terrain of tension, but American Son exposes the darkness that runs through working class to privileged suburbs as well

Art · Irony · Lament · Literature · Narrative · Tone (literature · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Themes in Literature Analysis