Sober, affecting novel for young readers

"A poem should not mean, but be." -- Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica

Sandra Cisneros' 1984 novel The House on Mango Street is bound to puzzle a lot of students, especially those who remember their literary terms all too well. There's not much of a plot here. I can't find the story's climax. Plenty of conflicts, but where's the resolution?

Here's the first thing you English teachers can tell your students: Rules, even writing rules, are made to be broken.

The House on Mango Street is very matter-of-fact in the way it tells its story. The novel has been described as a series of "vignettes" written in the first person of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl in the Hispanic section of Chicago. But "vignettes" is too lofty a term for the book's straightforward style. It's more like a series of intensely personal and frank diary entries. And each of these entries vividly depicts a particular aspect of Esperanza's life--the poverty-stricken neighborhood in which she is forced to live, some of the people she knows, and random thoughts that briefly illuminate her life's mysteries.

The book is plausibly written in the style of a talented, teenaged writer. It has the kind of mistakes that a young writer might let slip, such as run-on sentences and disconnected thoughts. Yet it has the kind of heartbreaking insight that only a young person could offer. And there are fresh metaphors that make you pity the cliches in which most writers (of any age) wallow. The windows in Esperanza's house aren't just tiny--they're "so small you'd think they were holding their breath."

Some readers are bound to be turned off by the novel's downbeat style. All around her, Esperanza is constantly reminded of her family's struggle to keep afloat, and the poor neighborhood which seems to bring all of its residents down to its level. Yet Esperanza finds a tiny ray of hope at novel's end--not an all-out happy ending, but a little something to keep her going.

Another literary term you English teachers can teach your students is "subtext"--when a statement has deeper layers of meaning than what is just said outright. Esperanza has such remarkable insight into the world around her, somehow you just know that she'll end up getting out of her sad situation.