The Brooklyn Rail

This is the end of the world. Maybe. In Brother Brontë, you almost pray it is. How could we all go on living this way, with so little food, so little art, so little infrastructure? In Three Rivers, Texas in 2038, citizens contend with all the expected trappings of apocalypse: widespread poverty, government-sponsored illiteracy, subjugated mothers, mass production of canned fish. It is a hellscape and it lingers. Fernando A. Flores’s sophomore novel looks to both our base and intellectual instincts to convey how close our world is to crumbling and how difficult it is to do something about it.

It takes a bit to acclimate to Flores’s plot—much of Book One (of three) is a meander through Three Rivers as Neftalí, the daughter of a martyred local activist, reels from a government raid on her childhood home. Her books have all been destroyed, and she is having visions of long-dead composer Juventino Rosas beckoning her to the sea. Neftalí is joined by her best friend and former band mate, Proserpina, who is contending with her own despair—her family is torn apart, and the guy she has been secretly sleeping with has given her head lice. Three Rivers is on the bust side of its boom, after tech companies poured in and then collapsed. The only remaining industry is a tinned fish factory running on the forced labor of the town’s single mothers. Neftalí and Proserpina bear witness to the realities of their city on this walk, where neighborhood boys do the bidding of the Mayor Pablo Henry Crick, tías try desperately to get an old industrial oven to work, and their friends Alexei and Moira collect bottle caps for a workplace-nightmare of an inventor who is trying to mold them into unsanctioned currency. It is a grueling existence, and they are devastatingly acclimated to it all.

Flores structures Brother Brontë like a web, its pathways sticky and stretched and gradually merging into one another. This results in a chaotic first act that is then mined for meaning in its successors. In Book Two we are transported back decades, to the timeline of Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, the author of Neftalí’s only remaining novel, Brother Brontë. Through Rivas we witness the acceleration of America’s societal collapse. Three Rivers is not an island of decline; civil and environmental catastrophe is a global burden. By Book Three, we are back with Neftalí. She is in mourning. She has a pet tiger now. She is not doing great.

Flores’s novel is given the description, “two women fight to save their dystopian border town,” which unfortunately serves as a grave misrepresentation of the novel’s plot and character studies. This is not a spunky revenge plot in which Neftalí and Proserpina gather a ragtag crew to take down the authoritarian mayor and save the day. This is a rendering of existence as trauma and existence as resistance. During the course of a day and then a year, Neftalí kills and eats a roaming chicken out of hunger then bathes herself in its oils out of guilt; she reads Brother Brontë over and over again out loud to her tiger, Mama, which she found on an abandoned property; she confronts Alexei who has aligned himself with Mayor Crick. Proserpina creates counterfeit food ration cards, she shaves her lice-infested hair, she performs funeral rites. Moira and Alexei sell their bodies and sell their souls and travel to farms and journey deeper into the urban underbelly. The tías feed their community tamales day-after-day. The worker-mothers revolt. Police assault protestors with bayonets. A distant volcano erupts, blocking the sun. And while yes, an assassination attempt does arise, it is almost as an aside, as it does not yield any consequential results for Three Rivers. This is not a story of two women, but rather a society facing the ebbs and flows of rebellion and exhaustion and reckoning with serving themselves, their community, or a cause.

In Brother Brontë, Fernando A. Flores presents us with a new Wild West of the near-future, one rooted in the conditions of now, where life in Texas is no less fraught, and intellectual and individual freedoms are the new land grab. There is heartache and hope in this read of authoritarian and environmental suffocation: when protests feel futile and elections fail us and screams seem to land in a void, all we have left is our daily service to ourselves and one another.