If you heard me call this novel dry and boring forget it I'm an idiot. This is actually a beautifully composed novel embedded with so much meaning, and I just had to let it reveal its structure to me, to invite me into the story as a participant — i.e. a reader-interpreter. I love that shit dude. I was raised on a diet of Nabokov and Hemingway, I eat that shit up.

What I believed in the first few pages was "dryness" was actually a disciplined restraint. First, in the sense that Gonzalez was careful not to be too sentimental or melodramatic in his prose, which resulted into a pragmatic account of day-to-day events, some them not particularly interesting, but it's precisely that subdued quality of the first half of the book that allows you to recognize the subtleties of action, thought, and atmosphere which were carefully placed in the narrative by the author although in plain sight they seemed so ordinary and boring.

By the last parts of the book, you would already know not to anticipate any big plot twists, and instead, would be reading the story between the lines, developing your own inferences based on the patterns that you have decided matters to your reading of a situation. In short, you'd have been writing your own story, while you are still reading this one.

The second aspect of his restrained style I didn't notice until I was about halfway into the novel. He was very careful (and consistent) in delimiting the narrative within the narrator's point of observation, which means that everything we know about the narrative is filtered through the narrator's thoughts, values, and subconscious feelings.

When your narrator is a middle class Filipino in America after World War II, the effect is so much dramatic irony that is simultaneously personal and specific, and communal and ubiquitous. Why? Because the Filipino-in-America experience is rife with contradictions: we are both insiders and outsiders; we are their colonial subjects, but we are also inheritors of their language, literature, and culture; we are shaped by a history of subjugation, yet we participate in the very systems that once oppressed us...

This novel describes that unique experience of alienation through the way that the narrator thinks and interacts with others but, ultimately, it is up to the reader to form the final picture, like puzzle pieces, because it is not explicitly said out loud, or more likely, because the narrator himself — the Filipino — is yet unaware that what he's feeling is actually a postcolonial loneliness.

So yeah I understand now why NVM Gonzalez is recognized as one of the greats. His technique is flawless.