SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND, by Jennine Capó Crucet
OK, stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A young Pitbull impersonator in Miami named Ismael grows obsessed with a killer whale held in captivity named Lolita while he attempts to both remake himself in the image of “Tony Montana for the new millennium” and untangle the mystery of his mother’s death more than a decade ago.
So goes the plot of Jennine Capó Crucet’s fourth book, “Say Hello to My Little Friend,” an impossible-to-define but highly digestible novel about Cuban heritage, migration, motherhood and the heartbreaking way young men float through life lost and desperate for meaning.
Izzy, who’s 20, was born in Cuba but has spent most of his life in Miami, where he was raised by his mother’s half sister. He recalls only fragments of how he arrived stateside on a raft when he was 7. To earn “easy extra money,” he works as an unauthorized Pitbull impersonator, but when he receives a cease-and-desist letter from the rapper, he pivots and fixates on becoming as rich and powerful as “Miami’s modern-day Scarface.” In an effort to find his own exotic animal like Montana’s signature tiger, he heads to Miami’s Seaquarium, where he sees Lolita and forms a psychic connection with her: He remembers meeting the orca in her enclosure years earlier, during a field trip when he first moved to the United States. She recognizes in him someone who is also lost.
Both are trapped in their own ways. Izzy wants to know if his mother loved him, and why she brought him to the United States in the first place. But those questions create a pen of their own; like Lolita, he seems to swim in circles, hoping for something to set him free. Together their parallel stories shape a commentary about what happens to us when we’re stuck in cages we were never designed for in the first place.
While Izzy is busy with things like courting his friend’s young and tender sister to be the Michelle Pfeiffer to his Al Pacino, capturing swamp wildlife for cash and asking powerful Cuban families in Miami too many troublesome questions about his mother, Lolita floats aimlessly in her tank, considering killing her trainers but never doing it, and wondering where her mother is after all these years. It’s an unlikely achievement to make a killer whale’s longing for her parent relatable, and yet Lolita’s story will feel familiar to anyone who has ever gotten lost as a child and eked out a pitiful, “Mom?” in an attempt to get back home. There’s something undeniable about Crucet’s characters — they feel so real in how the deck remains stacked against them.
The novel could easily slip into a text too dark to enjoy — the loss of Izzy’s mother is a grim undercurrent throughout the novel, even in chapters all about Lolita. It’s a relief, then, that Crucet’s prose is so sprightly and joyful. For instance, in one chapter, the narrator wonders how Tony Montana could have possibly gotten the scar on his face from oral sex, assessing the plausibility of several different scenarios: “A shard of glass falls from a light fixture overhead (feasibility depends on position),” Crucet writes. The vagina “is possessed by a 17th-century fencing champion (magical realism, appropriated by a white person.)” It’s a relief to laugh before the heaviness of Izzy’s mother returns.
But, as with most stories about ourselves and where we come from, there’s nothing more important here than the mother — our starting point for love, for trauma, for yearning for home and our fear that once we’re gone from it we’ll never get back. What could an orca held in captivity and a boy on the cusp of manhood have in common? They just needed their mothers; don’t we all.
SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND | By Jennine Capó Crucet | Simon & Schuster | 287 pp. | $27.99
