The American dream offers a salvation myth, which lures seekers to a country where a surgeon like Pol can become a “badly paid security guard at a computer chip company”. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you.” It remains to be seen whether she can open her damaged heart to the besotted Rosalyn For a Filipino generation who spent their lives “dreaming of America, singing its lyrics” the hardships of settling in their adoptive country are powerfully voiced here: “As for loving America or not loving America, these aren’t your problems, either. In a startling opening riff in the second person, we meet nurse Paz as she makes the leap from the Philippines to the San Francisco Bay Area in the hope of a better life (and so paving the way for new husband Pol, and eventually his niece Hero, to follow on family visas). Heaving with digressive sub-stories, untranslated dialect and jarring gearshifts in style, at first America Is Not the Heart somewhat resembles the hyperactive maximalist fiction that reached its zenith with David Foster Wallace during that decade. Much of the novel is set at the start of 1990s.
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