How does a nice guy like Long Beach writer David Hernandez produce a dark, dark book like ‘Suckerpunch’? A story of ancient Greece, Nazi Germany and America

FATHERHOOD IS POLITICAL
It’s a day before Election Day, and I’m driving through grassy, bushy, rainwashed, improbably shiny Belmont Shore whilst monitoring conservative talk radio. Call it watching the defectives. The Republican Party apparatchiks are pounding out their battle hymn, using radio and TV (I just turned off Fox News) to bang the drum for Mitt Romney. John McCain, they say, is a nut, maybe a traitor: One angry woman—they’re all angry about McCain, the former Vietnam POW and pragmatic Republican who makes frequent appearances on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart—raises the specter that he’s a Manchurian candidate: “Who knows what deals he made when he was in that Communist prison?” I figure he mostly sat around in a tiger cage waiting for his next beating. Huckabee “treats this whole thing like it’s a joke,” says a gentleman caller.

Romney, it emerges, is the “true conservative,” the same guy says, in part because, “you know, the American family is under attack, and he’s a family man, a father.”

A family man. A father.

Politics and art intersect at this moment because I’ve been reading David Hernandez’s Suckerpunch, a story in which two boys take a gun on the road to settle accounts with their violent, estranged father.  Hernandez is a Long Beach resident of some 10 years, but he was raised in Cerritos where his novel unfolds. It’s a family tale just out on HarperTeen; that’s Harper Collins’ Young Adult imprint. Publishers Weekly calls it “beautifully executed.” The industry review Kirkus says, “From the opening sentence, the writing shocks, then mesmerizes readers. . . . Hernandez’s solid first YA effort will have readers clamoring for his next work.”

But the novel has more in common with No Country for Old Men than My Friend Flicka; it’s more Brett Easton Ellis’ bleak Less Than Zero than, I don’t know, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Unlike Ellis, Hernandez is no nihilist; it’s unlikely there’s an American Psycho in him. Having said that, the novel is filled with suckerpunches—the father’s methodical beatings of Enrique; that father’s sudden exit from the family home; a community tested by small but powerful acts of mean-spiritedness; the death of another kid’s dad; the desperate teen hunger for someone else’s lover; the theft of a woman’s panties; and the dark, dark inevitability that Marcus discovers in those panties. Of his main characters, younger brother Enrique may be terminally fucked up by his father’s rage; that’s certainly one of the book’s points: Violence like love is a gift that keeps on giving.

But older brother Marcus is redeemed by novel’s end; he regards himself as a coward, but we know he simply hasn’t got the heart to hurt, that maybe there’s a kind of courage in kindness. He rescues a cat. He talks with real humanity to a retarded kid. He shepherds Enrique through antidepressants, their father’s brutality, and a revenge plot that drives the narrative.

MISSING PERSONS
It surprises Hernandez when you tell him that you find all this suspenseful. He’s a poet first, and (hold your breath here) poets don’t worry overmuch about suspense. His own undramatic family could run in four-color on a Mike Huckabee political mailer.

“It’s funny because if I ever wrote a memoir it’d be a thin pamphlet,” he says. And then he sketches out the opening for you: “‘Chapter One: Played Legos. Chapter Two: Played in the back yard.’ No one would read it.”

His parents raised him in a standard-issue two-story house in Cerritos. He graduated from Cerritos High and, while attending Cal State Long Beach, met the love of his life, Lisa Glatt, a CSULB English professor and writer. “I wasn’t his teacher,” she says quickly, worried perhaps we’re thinking of Mary Kay Letourneau. (We’re not.) They were introduced at a reading Glatt held in her Ocean Boulevard apartment for the writer Thomas Lux. Hernandez remembers in detail their first meeting. He was holding a gift of beer when she opened the door, looked at him and said, “Just give it to that man over there.”

When he recalls this, we’re sitting in their house a few blocks from Cal State Long Beach. It’s a home of mid-century modern furniture and wood floors illuminated by sunlight like gold coins bouncing off the floor of a vault. Warm but clean and uncluttered. His art—is there anything the guy can’t do?—adorns neutral-colored walls; a designer would know the words for these dun and dollar-bill-green walls. There are no children, just two child-like cats in the home, including one, Diego, a striped feline the shape of a watermelon on legs like drumsticks, an entire picnic in just one toddler-sized animal. And like many pet owners—just an observation; not a criticism—they regale you with tales of cat exploits: Diego fetches, chills with company, owns the house; I see that Diego observes our conversation with a cat’s sense of sage interest. You sense this bond between cat and man and you wonder—you can’t help it, but you don’t have the balls to ask about what seems so obvious: these two absolutely in-love artists married like eight years who stroke one another’s hands with great tenderness and laugh at one another’s jokes and reach profound levels of (let’s call it) discourse in a snap but have no children.

They considered it, Lisa says, but moved quickly past that decision point a while ago, and now she’s in her early 40s and he’s mid-30s, and she says they think about it once in a while—“like, it would have been nice.”

Unlike the fathers in Suckerpunch, Hernandez says his own “was extremely supportive.”

“Here he was with three kids, working nine to five,” Hernandez says. “I’ve got, like, two nights of driving [from his teaching job at UC Irvine, where he’s working on a Master’s in Fine Arts] that are bad for me. He worked and did that for five nights a week for years and years and years.” Some parents wig out about the kids’ prospects; not his. “I was an art major, and my parents were fine with that. And when I switched to poetry, they knew there was no money there. Most parents would say, ‘Poetry is great, but do this on the side. Think about business.’ But they understood this is what I love. They always supported me.” He’s almost incredulous himself when he observes, “My parents are still married, and they’re still very loving and supportive, but I’m drawn to this . . .”—he pauses a moment about what follows—“this dark side.”

Suckerpunch is haunted by darknesses, hallucinations and missing things. It’s like reading in a shadow sometimes. Marcus is missing a finger—among other things, his friends call him Nub—and his family is missing a man. The walls of Enrique’s room are Swiss-cheesed with fist-sized holes. There’s a car missing a horn (“‘What happens when you try to honk?’ I finally said. ‘Nothing happens,’ he answered. ‘Just silence.’”) Marcus’s friend Oliver just buried his own dad. Oliver’s mother is missing her panties.  They’re like black holes in life, these moments, blank spots so dense they generate their own gravity, pulling the characters and the reader toward the end.

AN ECONOMY OF SMALL SCALE
I didn’t grow up with the Young Adults category, never heard of it, moved pretty swiftly from my favorite juvenile novel (Snow Treasure, I think it was called, about kids who use their sleds to steal Nazi gold, effectively stalling the German advance through Norway) to Hemingway, which, come to think of it, might indeed be Young Adult at any age until you wake up one day in fear of the finger of time (it points downward) and raise a rifle’s black mouth to your own.

But it’s a huge movement, and unless you’ve got a teen or were one quite recently you might’ve missed it. And it’s not really new.

Michael Stearns works with Hernandez—he’s an editorial director at HarperCollins—and he traces the Young Adult market back to one Big Literary Bang, S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders—you may remember Ponyboy from the 1983 Matt Dillon vehicle of the same name. But “the ur-teen novel was Catcher in the Rye,” Stearns says. When I say that Suckerpunch reminds me of Less Than Zero, he agrees—and then points out that LTZ was essentially a teen novel.

“And it’s ‘Teen,’” Stearns says of the category, “not ‘Young Adult,’ which is, I don’t know, vaguely condescending to teens.”

Whatever you call it, Stearns says it’s booming. “We’re starting to see the kinds of numbers for Teen you see for adults,” Stearns says. He credits Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series; “the third one published this summer and sold a million copies out of the gate.” He’s looking for similar success from The Luxe, already “a huge bestseller, as if Edith Wharton wrote Gossip Girl”—this last a series of wildly popular teen novels by Cecily Von Ziegesar.

The news that teens are reading ink on paper should be glad tidings of great joy, but there’s this, Stearns says: When I ask him if he expects Suckerpunch to make it with adults, he says of course: “Half the buyers of Gossip Girl are adults.”

How do you explain that? I ask.

“I don’t know,” Stearns says. “It just appeals.”

FATHER NO IS BEST
What’s appealing about Suckerpunch is the sense that justice is nigh; “it’s Friday,” as they say in African-American churches on Good Friday, “but Sunday’s a-coming.” The book is terribly sweet and epidermis-on-asphalt raw.

“When I met David, he was concerned that his writing was too edgy, too sophisticated, too dark, too adult—whatever—to be appropriately published for teens,” says Lauren Velevis, his former editor at HarperCollins, now herself pursuing a degree in writing. “But what I told him, what I believe as an editor, is that the only thing that needs to be present to qualify something as YA is a teen narrator with a plot driven by topics and issues that appeal to/concern a teen audience. David’s characters have such great and authentic teen voices that any dark material in the novels feels completely intrinsic to the characters, never gratuitous.”

Of course, we were all teens and the “issues that appeal to/concern a teen audience” are universal among humans: They’re enshrined in that Sophoclean masterpiece, Oedipus Rex. When the gods warn Queen Jocasta that her infant son will grow up to murder his father, she hands him over to an executioner who takes mercy on the boy who grows up to search out his biological parents but murders one of them—his father!—on the road home and then marries his mother—Jocasta! The weight of this love-and-murder triangle is more than the kingdom of Thebes can support; it collapses. That train of deadly attractions is so pervasive in the West that it’s built right into Sigmund Freud’s model of male psychological development.

It’s epic, this tale, and it’s mirrored loosely—updated certainly—in Suckerpunch. It helps that Hernandez’s prose is poetic. At his high school, Marcus regards “the bitten fingernail of the moon, giving us just a teaspoon of light.” Out for a joyride, the boys spin their car; the headlights sweep across a home, where Marcus can “see the father, his wifebeater shirt and thinning hair, his thick-rimmed glasses turned toward the window, wondering about the light.” When their father leaves, Marcus and Enrique haul his favorite lime-green chair to the curb; the garbage man lifts it with just one hand and tosses it into his truck, “as if it didn’t weigh a thing.”

The unbearable lightness of parents—their inability to parent—seems likely to reverberate in the minds of young readers raised on a generation of TV shows in which all the kids are smarter than all the adults. And it ought to be popular among conservatives, who could see in Suckerpunch a terrifyingly vivid account of the collapse of the family. In this book, Enrique, the younger brother raised on a steady diet of beatings, spins out of control. By novel’s end it’s no surprise that he’s become his savage old man.

But Hernandez says he didn’t aim to write a political treatise about the decline of the American family.

“I don’t set out with an agenda or theme or commentary on male aggression or parenting,” Hernandez says. “I just start writing and the story develops. It’s not until I’m well into the book that I start really thinking about that, the larger issues.

“And I don’t like to spell it out. I want the readers to come to their own conclusions.”

We talked for a while about how conservatives have worked overtime to capture the family issue, as if somehow all members of Republican families happily orbit a gentle father and godly mother, while liberal families flame out in violence and sexual disloyalty. Mitt Romney has said that his No. 1 issue as president would be the family; what that means precisely, unless it means endless, saccharine sermons or the destruction of liberty, is unclear.

In any case, Hernandez says, it’s a child’s game, played by a nation of political children. “I think family is just basic humanity,” he says. “I don’t see how that issue can be political. It’s more like common sense.”

WHENCE THE DARKNESS?
I find it hard to believe that a guy who sounds this kind—and who reports the kindnesses of his dutiful parents, their almost painful goodness and invariable Hallmark Card niceness—I find it hard to believe that that guy came up with a novel in which men betray their wives, shoot themselves, pound the teeth from their children’s mouths, flee, and collapse into hopelessness. And his poetry is the same, which you can get just from the table of contents: “Damage,” “Alzheimer’s,” “Always Danger,” “Bully,” “Bullets,” and, my favorite, “Chess Match Ends in Fight.” Like that. In Suckerpunch, when his dad has been gone for about a year, for instance, Marcus runs into men who remind him of Dad. “A shoe salesman. The new janitor at school. Some stranger sitting at a bus stop wearing wraparound shades.” They’re men, I guess—I mean, they’ve got a pair of testicles—but they’ve been gutted. Far from heroic, they work for others in menial occupations or wait for mass transit. It’s easy to imagine their hopelessness, and to extrapolate from that to scenes of domestic violence.

I ask Hernandez: “Where’s that come from?”

He answers, as any good writer does, that his imagination is the source of everything, and that little of the book—and certainly not the Bad Dads—is autobiographical.

He recalls poetry readings when he’d look at his audience and wonder what the hell brought them not like moths to a flame but whatever it is that flees into the dark. “I’d think to myself, ‘Why am I reading to these people?’”

And I wonder that myself—or something similar: Why is he writing it? But he insists it’s all good, his life, and that he can’t find a starting point in his hunger for bad news.

Later, though, we’re talking and he offers this about his mother’s dad:

“I know that my mom had a rough upbringing. My grandfather was abusive, and so I got to hear bits and pieces of that. And that was strange because I saw him, and I didn’t see that violence in him. But I knew. And every once in a while there was this feeling that this terrible thing had happened to my mother, and any anxieties going on with her I felt in the house.”

Hernandez eventually learned that the grandfather himself had suffered terribly, back when he was a parentless slum rat in Santiago, Chile. And then I imagine Suckerpunch beginning with some act of nuclear-family terror detonating maybe 60 years ago in some South American hovel, a suckerpunch so profound it resonates down through the generations and leaves knucklemarks on a printed page.

I don’t have to imagine for long. When I visit Hernandez at his lean, clean home, he gives me a copy of Always Danger, one of his books of poetry. Each piece is a tale of almost masochistic observation; in “Fontanelle” he writes, “Who hasn’t once imagined pushing their finger through the dome [of an infant’s skull], poking the gray matter?”

But I also find this—a poem I’m pretty sure is about Grandpa Punchy from Santiago, the big hints being that it’s called “The Grandfather” and it’s about a guy who grows up sans parents in Chile and ends up whacking the shit out of people later in life. While I read it, Romney is on TV behind me, explaining that he’s pulling out of the race because, “in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Seriously? If we have a real debate, the terrorists win?

And I want to tell you that our story, the one I’m telling you, comes down to this: That until we can satisfy our personal need for a Dad to tell us what to do, until we can get over our fear of uncertainty, we’re a subject people, we’re the people who re-elected George W. Bush, we’re Marcus and Enrique in Suckerpunch, tormented by the man we love; we are the daughter in Hernandez’s poem “The Grandfather,” a victim of the father whose hand

Curled around a closed umbrella
As he swung it down again and again
In a gesture known as violence
Against his daughter bleating on her bed.

EPILOGUE
In 1971, UCLA history professor Peter Lowenberg published “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort” in the American Historical Review. In that essay, Lowenberg used psychoanalysis—that’s Sigmund Freud—to understand the rise of Hitler: In World War I, 11 million German men were mobilized; 1.7 million of those died; nearly 5 million more were wounded. The impact on German life of missing fathers, and wounded, hollow men who returned from the Western and Eastern fronts to a Germany that was raked by worldwide Depression, epidemic illness, radical workers’ movements and famine produced a generation of Germans (particularly German men) looking for order and family. They found it in Hitler.

SUCKERPUNCH BY DAVID HERNANDEZ | HARDCOVER | 224 PAGES | $16.99 | OUT NOW ON HARPERTEEN

Tags: Books, david hernandez, family, Long Beach, politics, suckerpunch