When is it appropriate to say “Merry Christmas”? The church calendar still has us in Advent, and more than a few liturgists think we can be in too much of a hurry to get to the big day. After all, we don’t say “Alleluia,” much less wish each other “Happy Easter,” in the middle of Lent. Why are we in such a hurry to get to Christmas Day?
In Catholic churches, this can become an argument over whether or not the statue of the Baby Jesus should be placed in the crèche before Christmas. Sometimes this is a question of practicality: The Rev. Neil Connolly, who was a pastor for many years in the South Bronx, used to keep Baby Jesus in storage until Christmas Eve because one year at St. Athanasius, he was stolen from the manger. (A repentant thief soon returned him.)
Our proleptic celebration in this space has a practical dimension as well: America has published more than a few articles over the years offering ideas for Christmas gifts, and it wouldn’t do much good to share those next week, right? In 2018, Vivian Cabrera collected suggestions from staff for last-minute gifts—a list that included Trappist jam, Trappist beer, a pony, lots of books and a baseball signed by Bob Dylan.
More germane to our interests here were two guides to Christmas reading, one from 2007 and one from 2015. One book appeared on both lists: Mr. Ives’ Christmas, by Oscar Hijuelos. America curiously never reviewed any of his books—including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love—but his 1995 riff on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has always had its fans among our contributors. In 2007, we noted that the national bestseller (and itself a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) was not a light read, but was “a terrific holiday book for gourmands of richer, heavier literary fare.”
To be sure, Mr. Ives’ Christmas doesn’t start off with a great deal of Christmas cheer: We find early on that Mr. Ives’s 17-year-old son had been murdered by another teenager just a few days before Christmas in 1967. For a quarter of a century following, Christmas is a reminder for Mr. Ives and his wife of what they have lost; their son, who had been preparing to enter the seminary, becomes a Dickensian ghost in his own way for the narrator (some of whose primary treasures are first editions of Dickens books). Mr. Ives goes so far as to begin communicating with his son’s killer as he seeks closure or answers, and finds his faith tested every year.
Ultimately, Hijuelos turns this tale of a man sleepwalking through life after an unimaginable tragedy into a story of forgiveness and God’s providence. “Mr. Hijuelos has told a tale of what theologians call final perseverance, a parable of good will lost and good will regained,” wrote the book critic Jack Miles in 1995. “The shortest of Oscar Hijuelos’s recent novels, ‘Mr. Ives’ Christmas’ is in my judgment both the deepest and the best.”
Oscar Hijuelos was born in 1951 in Morningside Heights in Manhattan to Cuban immigrants who spoke Spanish at home. An almost year-long hospitalization in Connecticut as a child to treat nephritis resulted in Hijuelos becoming fluent in English but losing some of his native facility. “It was during that long separation from my family that I became estranged from the Spanish language and, therefore, my roots,” he wrote in the New York Times in 2011. He attended three different community colleges in New York City before graduating from City College in 1975 and earning a master’s degree in creative writing there a year later. He later wrote of the impressive group of literary influences he encountered at City College, including Donald Barthelme, William S. Burroughs and Susan Sontag.
He worked in advertising for a number of years while writing on the side. Hijuelos published his first novel, Our House in the Last World, in 1983; the debut effort, which tells the story of a Cuban family migrating from Havana to Harlem in the 1940s, earned Hijuelos the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Six years later came The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, the tale of two Cuban brothers who immigrate to the United States in the 1950s and experience brief fame—and a lifetime of memories—with their band. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990 and was later adapted into a movie.
Mambo Kings earned high praise from Michiko Kakutani (no easy task) in The New York Times in 1989. “Oscar Hijuelos’s remarkable new novel is another kind of American story—an immigrant story of lost opportunities and squandered hopes,” she wrote. “While it dwells in bawdy detail on Cesar’s sexual escapades, while it portrays the musical world of the 50’s in bright, primary colors, the novel is essentially elegiac in tone—a Chekhovian lament for a life of missed connections and misplaced dreams.”
Hijuelos’s next novel, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, appeared in 1993, followed by Mr. Ives’ Christmas in 1995; further books included Empress of the Splendid Season in 1999 and A Simple Habana Melody (From When the World Was Good) in 2002. He also published a YA novel, Dark Dude, in 2008. His final novel, Beautiful Maria of My Soul (2010), revisited a character from Mambo Kings. Hijuelos also published a memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, in 2011.
Hijuelos died of a heart attack on Oct. 12, 2013, at the age of 62.
Over the years, Hijuelos taught at both Hofstra University and Duke University, where he was on the faculty for six years. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize and Rome Prize, he was also honored with the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature, and in 2003, the University of California at Santa Barbara honored him with the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.
His obituary in the New York Times quoted him on his return from the alienation he felt in early life from his native culture. “I eventually came to the point that, when I heard Spanish, I found my heart warming. And that was the moment when I began to look through another window, not out onto 118th Street, but into myself,” he wrote in 2011, “through my writing, the process by which, for all my earlier alienation, I had finally returned home.”
Merry Christmas—and a blessed Advent—to you all!
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Juniper Rising,” by Richard Schiffman. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
