Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut novel, Catalina, is a hagiographic narrative beginning in 2010, so realistic and meandering that it could almost be unreadable. But a miraculous lifeblood animates the book, like Victor Frankenstein’s mysterious spark—perhaps, here, a voice of passion and intelligence.
The novel’s retrospective narrator, Catalina Ituralde, is a college student and undocumented immigrant from Ecuador who has grown up under the care of her grandparents in Queens, NY, following her parents’ young deaths. She is ambivalent about God, contemptuous of nature, and admittedly desirous of an “artificial and white” Christmas tree. A senior at Harvard, she trudges through her literature thesis, thorny relationships, and her grandfather’s impending deportation, caught in a chasm between the prestigious higher education milieu and her problem-beset family.
I hesitate to follow in the tired tradition of pasting the title of autofiction onto women’s work. There are, however, inextricable resemblances between Cornejo Villavicencio’s life and Catalina’s: the author is also an Ecuadorian immigrant writer who was raised in Queens, NY, and she also graduated from Harvard.
The ubiquity of Catalina’s name in the text emblemizes her singularity; it beats throughout the novel as a melody, a promise, an incantation. She exists at the center of her own universe, at one point narrating, “I listened to more songs I imagined might remind Nathaniel of me.” Much of her relationship with Nathaniel takes place at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, where Catalina works: a quirky offshoot of the prestigious institution that “felt like someone’s Connecticut mansion that happened to have on display a bear claw necklace acquired by Lewis and Clark.”
In Catalina, the exterior plot is meager; voice and emotion propel the novel. As the reader becomes entangled within Catalina’s dangerous brain, Catalina’s depression becomes more penetrating, her indifferences more painful. Still, Cornejo Villavicencio does not offer us a satisfying resolution. Catalina submits her thesis, but she does not win the prize that she impassively expected; she ends her romantic relationship; and she secures a job at a tutoring company, as her ambitions to be a “capital-A artist” buckle beneath her depression.
Catalina is witty, though this wit sometimes comes at the expense of believability. When Nathaniel asks, “Why are you here?” at an awards ceremony, she quips back with, “Why are any of us here?” These pithy contrivances are the largest drawbacks of the novel.
But quite successfully, Catalina is a novel of history lessons, whose namesake is our interlocutor between past and present, both as a Peabody employee and as a storyteller. Late in the novel, Catalina is transferred to Peabody’s Vault to “forestall the inevitable transformation of ancient artifacts into dust.” Writing, like the work of a museum, has a way of immortalizing, or bestowing permanence upon, the ephemeral: Cornejo Villavicencio writes of scary histories—women stuffing themselves with potatoes to prevent rape, girls forced to traffic drugs and defecate small pellets of cocaine. Nothing is shrouded; everything is on the table. Cornejo Villavicencio, whose nonfiction The Undocumented Americans was a National Book Award finalist, brings this research expertise to her debut fiction, weaving it through these historical asides in educative but adroit executions.
Her novel is also one of interiority and descent. The eponymous protagonist drinks vodka in the morning, vomits, and has sex with strangers. She neglects herself and her loved ones. She shirks her responsibilities. Cornejo Villavicencio illustrates these patterns of neglect to be generational: inherited from her grandparents, who avoid opening important mail—bills, court notices—to Catalina, who is undoubtedly brilliant yet self-destructive. She leaves her inbox flooded and jumps out of a moving car amidst a fight with her love interest.
Catalina is a meta-textual and tactile ode. It is a book about family loyalty and not cleaning up messes. Our titular character says, with her entry into Nathaniel’s social scene, that newly accumulating party invitations make her feel like “a fugitive, a wanted woman.” There’s the illicit meaning to the adjective “wanted”—a criminal fleeing, evading search. But wanted might also simply mean desired. The phrase becomes a metonym of a central theme in Catalina: to be chased, to be craved, and the tension that exists between the two. If she hopes to be coveted and then runs when she is, how do we reconcile the warring impulses, and where should we chisel the demarcations?