Bad Vibes
Alberto Fuguet
When seventeen-year-old Matìas Vicuna runs away from his family's louche Santiago penthouse, he has a series of whimsical, identity-seeking encounters. He tries on hats. He convinces a shopgirl that he is half-Chinese. Most tellingly, he checks into a hotel under the assumed name of "Holden Caulfield." While it's natural for an adolescent to emulate appealing iconic figures, a first-time author takes a significant risk in such bald acknowledgement of his literary influences. Alberto Fuguet pulls it off quite cleverly though, not just borrowing from The Catcher In the Rye's content, but using that novel itself as a plot element in Bad Vibes (first published in Chile in 1991). For the book's first two thirds Matìas repeatedly ignores an older friend's encouragement to read Salinger, instead choosing to wallow in a spiritual cesspool of bad disco music, television soap operas, sex and drugs. He also gets caught in a chillingly rendered undercurrent of anti-semitism. When Matìas finally reads The Catcher In the Rye, the book becomes an inspirational raft on which he begins floating toward maturity (Yes, Huckleberry Finn also makes a cameo). Fuguet's appropriations never reduce his book to gimmickry thanks to remarkably full-bodied characters. Matìas's father, an arrested adolescent himself, is sad, scary, and strangely lovable. A maid is surprisingly—and believably —sophisticated. While the book's dozens of personalities are deftly etched, thematic threads are less thoroughly worked through. Efforts to explore Chilean politics and international pop culture prove particularly unsatisfying. Still, paired with this novel's successes, such ambitious failings make one anxious to read Fuguet's future work.
