title: Mr. Ives' Christmas
author:  Oscar Hijuelos 
description: The signal event of this novel?the shooting of the protagonist's son?is announced early, and the rest of the book is imbued with a melancholy only occasionally illuminated by spiritual revelation or insight. Edward Ives is a foundling, adopted by a widowed print shop manager and raised uneventfully in an idyllic?though Depression-era?New York City of egg creams, stickball and melting-pot color. Ives's dark looks and his father's long history of working amiably with Cuban pressmen incline him toward a sympathy with Hispanics and their culture, which conveniently anchors Hijuelos in a world he knows well. As a child, Ives shows a penchant for drawing, and he meets his future wife, Annie MacGuire, in a class at the Art Students League. Their first child, Robert (or Roberto), born in 1950, is murdered at age 17 on the streets of New York by a Puerto Rican teenager. The case is celebrated?Robert had just decided to enter the priesthood and was killed for a measly $10; by his side was found a shopping bag full of record albums?Christmas presents carefully chosen for each member of his family. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Hijuelos showed he can sharply evoke a vibrant, multicultural New York, capturing its music, its menace and its smell. Here, however, every storefront is darkened by the grief of Edward Ives, and every note is tamped. It is as if the lovelorn Nestor of Mambo Kings has returned from the dead to play his sad arias in a world?and a book?absent his lively, spirited brother, Cesar. The author's attempts to render all this as a Dickensian tale of redemption through dignified suffering?Dickens is invoked more than a dozen times?are crude and work no wonders. Not even a long-foreshadowed and deferred meeting at the end of the book between Ives and his son's murderer helps: "Nothing monumental transpired. Niceties were exchanged." Same for the book. BOMC selection; author tour. <br />Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  MR. IVES’S CHRISTMAS
  
  
  
  
  
  Oscar Hijuelos
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The author expresses his gratitude to the following persons: Harriet
  Wasserman; Robert S. Jones, my editor; Lori Carlson; and Philip Graham.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  It is impossible to be religious, impossible to be merry, at every moment of
  life, and festivals are as sunlit peaks, testifying above dark valleys, to the
  eternal radiance.
  
  
  – Clement A. Miles
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  LONG AGO AT CHRISTMAS
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  LONG AGO CHRISTMAS
  
  
  Years ago, in the 1950s, as a young man working for a Madison Avenue
  advertising agency, Ives always looked forward to the holiday season and would
  head out during his lunch hours, visiting churches, to think and meditate,
  and, if he was lucky, to hear the choirs as they practiced their hymns and
  sacred songs. Often enough, he walked along the burgeoning sidewalks, crowded
  with shoppers and tourists, and made his way to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral,
  where he’d become lost in a kind of e