No. 5: The House on Mango Street

The enduring lessons of a curriculum staple

Five years ago, I wanted to revive a dormant part of my brain. It had been years since college and my last creative writing course, which was pretty much the last time I had written about anything outside of my job. Once the college basketball season ended that spring, I decided, I would take one of those creative writing classes always being advertised around the city. Before that, in an effort to recapture some of the imagination and ambition of my past, I thought it would be productive to revisit works that fostered those feelings in the first place — that made me want to write. There was no doubt that one of them would be Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.

Over my life, Mango is probably the book I’ve returned to more than any other. (Its closest challenger would be Jesus’ Son.) I first read it in my seventh grade English class; two years later, as a freshman in high school, we were assigned it again. In both instances I remember loving it, I am sure in no small part because my lazy brain was fond of its length: just 107 pages, broken into dozens of individually named vignettes, in turn leaving large numbers of those pages half-blank. One of the few English assignments from that period I remember at all (and remember enjoying) was writing Mango-style vignettes about our own lives. Somewhere in a box in my parents’ basement is my adolescent attempt, modeled after the book’s “Hairs,” to introduce and characterize my family through descriptions of their noses.

The House on Mango Street follows its narrator, Esperanza, a young Mexican-American girl in Chicago, as she longs for a better life and a true home while beginning to understand and confront the issues that await her in adulthood. That summary doesn’t really do it justice, I know. (I hate writing about writing.) There’s a lot more going on — about that strange time on the precipice of maturity, about the double edges to womanhood’s swords, about personal and cultural identity, about class, about the stifling a dreamer feels surrounded by glass ceilings and walls.

But what’s always struck me about the book as much as the story it tells is how it tells it. It unfolds in elliptical, impressionistic glimpses, with a specificity that infuses the text with both momentum and power. The details of Esperanza’s world are at once so clearly hers and yet universally understood: the intrigue and importance of eating lunch at her school’s “canteen,” gossiping about the private lives of mysterious neighbors, trading speculations and half-truths with friends about boys and changing bodies. What runs through all of them is dreams and worries about what awaits on the other side of this strange and pivotal period in one’s life. Many of the vignettes function as introductions to members and aspects of Esperanza’s neighborhood — nearly all the way through the book you are still meeting people, as Cisneros builds a world in which Esperanza’s existence, perspective, and observations provide ample narrative tension. And you can do that, tell a story that slowly and carefully reveals itself like the way that life does, when you can write like life. The House on Mango Street is precise and spare, two of the hardest things for writing to be, and because of that it’s alive, which is maybe the most important.

Over time I have learned I am drawn to wise stories told through a child’s voice. It is not an easy balance to execute — too far in either direction stretches credibility, comes off either cloying or overly weary. But when done right, it can resonate profoundly, recalling the reader’s own younger innocence while recasting the reality around that past self more clearly. This is especially true in writing as compact as Cisneros’, as she so eloquently captures Esperanza beginning to recognize the patterns and power dynamics around her; the reader knows where the truth keeps going after her words stop. “Everything is holding its breath inside me,” Cisneros-as-Esperanza writes after watching a favored neighbor galavant with his girlfriend, distilling a universe of adolescent yearning into seven words. Examples seem too abundant to cite.

There’s a verisimilitude in Mango’s telling that so many first-person works lack: there is no more natural format for a middle-schooler to pen their story than in streaming, journal-style bursts of just a few hundred words. When I first read the book as a middle- and then high-schooler, it illuminated the possibilities of narrative voice, how exciting it could be when it helps build a world and characters beyond just describing them. And to do it so succinctly seemed a trick that inspired and thrilled me. How could she pack so much feeling into so few words, so many lives into so little witnessed action and exposition? Cisneros’ writing is short but never plain, vivid even in its brevity: the heartbreak of “Geraldo No Last Name” spans just over one page’s worth of text; in less than three pages “No Speak English” transforms its title from one woman’s excuse to her desperate command. By there being so little on the page every bit calls your attention, and through Cisneros’ craft they all deserve it. Every time I return to the book I find another lesson in how to land a knockout blow with no wasted motion.

In Mango, adolescence proves lonely, confusing, hurtful. Bad things happen to innocent people. The book gets as heavy as the lives on Mango Street. But there is an invigorating allure to the way Cisneros so masterfully animates it all. Perhaps poignant is the word. Again terms like “alive” and “human” come to mind. Something courses through it that feels like connection.

So let me end with a connection this book forged, however indirectly. This past summer I brought Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a collection of Cisneros’, to read on the flights to and from a bachelor party in Montreal. Late on the afternoon of my return, all the flights back to New York got canceled, mine being nixed after we had already boarded, deplaned, and been lengthily delayed. After making my way back through the terminal and exiting to find a hotel, I realized I had left my book in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me. I asked an agent at the ticketing desk if she could find out whether the crew had found a book on board. Maybe an hour or so later an airline employee arrived and returned it to me. I thanked everyone involved and went on my way.

Then, suddenly, an agent at the next desk over rushed over to catch up with me. “Cisneros!” she said, eyeing my book’s cover. She told me, in her French-Canadian accent, that she did her college thesis on The House on Mango Street. She had actually never read Woman Hollering Creek, she said. But Cisneros, Mango Street — she was so overcome with her fondness for that story and its words that she could hardly form her own. Her eyes appeared to be welling. “I’m so glad you got your book,” she told me finally, hand on her heart. My whole trip home it stayed with me.