As Ancestry.com shows, searching for one’s roots has become an instructive and entertaining pastime. Typically, seekers seem to be middle-aged, second-generation professionals secure in their identities but curious about their parents’ or more likely grandparents’ origins. We warm at their surprise and delight as they discover who’s in their family tree and then we learn no more. Not so, with Lauren Rico, whose suspenseful novel Familia, owes its origin to her finding out from an ancestry DNA test that her forebears went back 69 generations on the island of Puerto Rico, dating to 245 A.D.
That fact not only startled the award-winning NPR classical music broadcaster but motivated her to look into the implications of the U.S. territory’s devastating last few years – hurricanes, floods, abandoned towns and villages, political unrest, domestic violence. Although these catastrophes may not have adversely affected tourism at San Juan’s famous luxury resorts, they may nonetheless have caused or added to anxiety about San Juan’s nearby historic shantytown, La Perla, which figures centrally in her novel. A reputed center of crime and drugs, turning tourist caution into fear.
In Familia, Rico explores the island’s familial and cultural traditions by way of an engaging narrative about two women who consider their possible separation in Puerto Rico when one was 5, the other seven months, a consideration that weighs the force of nature and nurture on character development. Familia is a heartwarming story with autobiographical memories of the author’s childhood visits to a tiny fishing village on the southwest coast, a place where neighbors became extended family.
Despite what a brief summary may suggest, Familia is hardly a sentimental or predictable tale. A violent prologue headed “That Day” looks back 20 years and subsequent “That Day” chapters alternate with chapters called “Today” that constitute the main narrative. In the prologue Alberto, a widower, in thrall to drugs, alcohol, and defeat who works for the key criminal of the island is beaten almost to death and his 7-month-old daughter, Marianna, whom he had with him in a bar, goes missing. Her disappearance becomes the cold case of the island. Forward 20 years later to Gabby in New York. Gabby, whose beloved parents have recently died, is a kind of a loner but loves her journalism job as a fact checker, at which she excels, though she wishes her attractive boss would give her more responsibility. She wants to be a writer.
When she starts working on a story about the integrity of ancestry searches, she takes a DNA test as part of her research. And what do you know – it comes back overwhelmingly linking her to an older woman in Puerto Rico, Isabella. Isabella, Alberto’s older daughter, who’s been obsessing all her life about her missing baby sister, feels sure that Gabby is the one. But how could this be? Gabby had loving parents, a birth certificate, and is so different from the shrewd, assertive, caustic Isabella. An exciting detective story heats up. The theme is subtler than at first appears: As Gabby muses, “The truth of one life makes the other one a lie . . . But which is which and which one do we want to be the truth?” Today, when some states are revisiting ethnic and racial curricular history in schools, Rico prompts the reader to think about this and other questions: do we have to disown a previous identity because of new information provided by DNA? Despite the import of Thomas Wolfe’s famous phrase, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” in some ways, maybe can.
