“A single way to grow up in public”: our critique of Malena Newton Maúrtua’s book of stories

“A single way to grow up in public” (title that refers to “Growing Up in Public”, the reflective and sarcastic song by Lou Reed), the debut of Malena Newton Maúrtua (Lima, 1993), means one of the most pleasant surprises that our ultimate narrative has given us. It is not a flawless or round book, although it is fresh and authentic; Not all of his stories are equally effective, but they show the expressive need of someone who has a consistent drive discourse and, furthermore, the ideal weapons to translate it into a series of texts where psychological progression, insightful humor and poignant observation find a communion almost always successful.

On a first reading, the book may seem diverse and even thematically dispersed; a second look will clarify this impression: Newton’s characters, although they follow different paths, are united by their manifest inability to overcome the incomprehension of their peers, subtle and brutal at the same time. They are alike in the impossible mission of accepting the rules of reality where they necessarily interfere: in all cases, the result of these confrontations is a silent defeat, sometimes allegorized by visions of infernal dreams; this happens at the end of the tense “Talk in the shower”. In other stories, such as “A Roof on the Floor”, rooted in fantasy –about a mysterious living and devouring building–, the symbolic proposal on social inequality and evasion recalls the treatment of abandoned buildings and structures in fiction Ballard’s: primitive spaces impervious to the absurd and pernicious decisions of the authorities of the outside world.

But the greatest merit of “A single way to grow up in public” is without a doubt its detailed and convincing perspective of the ‘millennial’ universe, materialized in the two best stories of the set: “An ex type” and “A password is a name or a lie? Newton is right in his parody of affectation, the naïve spirit, and the irritating worldview of middle-class Lima adolescence and youth at the beginning of this century. The first of the narrations cited is an amusing approach to the racket of human relations of our bourgeoisie, clouded by the constant simulation in which victims and perpetrators are confused. The second is an acid exploration into the entrails of an exclusive girls’ school, shaken by hatred and tribal revenge carried out by characters who, despite their cartoonish conception, speak, breathe and act with credibility and consequence. The author deals with the cliché and extracts from that struggle the truth that circulates among the school stereotypes that tire other similar projects.

Malena Newton is not exactly a stylist; her prose advances more relying on the strength of the sentences (some very successful) and on the accumulated suspense than on the work with the language, sober but with agile functionality. However, at times she summons us a suggestive lyricism capable of giving ingenious and very beautiful images (“the sun begins to go into the sea like a bag of chamomile”) and lavishes a rhythmic rhythm that emulates that of everyday life portrayed from different plans. A very satisfying start for a writer that we will keep track of.