The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien by Oscar Hijuelos

First published: 1993

Type of plot: Family

Time of work: The twentieth century

Locale: Pennsylvania, Cuba, New York, California, and Alaska

Principal Characters:

  • Emilio Montez O’Brien, an actor and photographer, youngest child and only son of Nelson and Mariela Montez O’Brien
  • Margarita Montez O’Brien, the eldest O’Brien child, a Spanish teacher
  • Nelson O’Brien, an Irish immigrant and sire to fifteen children
  • Katherine Anne (Kate) O’Brien, Nelson’s sister, who dies of pneumonia soon after she and her brother settle in Pennsylvania
  • Mariela Montez O’Brien, Nelson’s wife, a Cuban immigrant and mother to fifteen children
  • Gloria Montez O’Brien, the youngest O’Brien daughter, who is hopelessly in love with younger brother Emilio
  • Isabel Montez O’Brien, the second O’Brien daughter, who marries a Cuban and settles in Cuba
  • Maria Montez O’Brien, the third O’Brien daughter, a successful singer
  • Lester Thompson, Margarita’s wealthy and abusive first husband
  • Betsy MacFarland, Emilio’s first wife, a golddigger
  • Jessica Brooks, Emilio’s beloved second wife, who is running a restaurant in Alaska when he meets her
  • Leslie Howard, a courtly octogenarian pilot whom Margarita meets and marries when she is ninety

The Novel

The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien opens with a chart of those sisters and of Emilio in order of their dates of birth. Their story, though, begins with the migration to the United States of Nelson O’Brien, a young Irish photographer, and his sister Kate. When Kate dies of pneumonia soon after they settle in bucolic Cobbleton, Pennsylvania, a despondent Nelson goes off to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War. In Santiago, Cuba, he meets and marries Mariela Montez and begins the large and lively family whose experiences are the subject of Oscar Hijuelos’s third novel. Concentrating on Margarita, the eldest, born in 1902, and Emilio, the youngest, born in 1925, the book traces the experiences of the O’Briens throughout most of the twentieth century.

As the opening sentence proclaims, “The house in which the fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien lived radiated femininity.” That radiation is powerful enough to cause horses to throw their riders, cars to skid into ditches, and a plane to fall from the sky; Hijuelos endows his gynocratic household with Magical Realism. One of the sisters, Patricia, is even explicitly clairvoyant, adept at divining the fates of her many siblings; however, recognizing a rival to his narrative authority, Hijuelos relegates Patricia to a minor role and characterizes her as reluctant to indulge in prophecy.

Patriarch Nelson O’Brien senses himself condemned to solitude in his own crowded home, and his proficiency at generating daughters perplexes and perturbs him. He rejoices when his final, fifteenth, child turns out at last to be a son. For Emilio, surrounded and coddled by a mother and fourteen sisters, woman sets the standard.

Emilio is not born until the middle of the novel, and the focus of the first third of the book is on Margarita and her largely erotic longings. Her adolescent fantasies focus on a barnstorming pilot whose plane becomes disabled near the O’Brien house. Margarita’s marriage to the wealthy Lester Thompson proves to be a disaster and, after sixteen years, ends in divorce. In later years, Margarita finds fulfillment in teaching and in travel. She becomes the lover of a Cuban she meets in Spain and later, at the age of ninety, marries a pilot named Leslie Howard. In a culmination of her adolescent dreams about the demobilized aviator who came to stay with the O’Briens so very long ago, she learns at last to fly.

As a child, Emilio is especially attached to Margarita, while sister Gloria develops an unseemly crush on him. He eventually breaks free of coddling by the female O’Briens when he enlists in the Army, serving in the infantry during fierce combat in Italy. When World War II concludes, Emilio goes to New York to make his mark as an actor. After some success on the stage, he moves to Hollywood, where, during a career that lasts five years, he makes forty-two B-films. Using the screen name Montgomery O’Brien, he becomes popular playing private investigator Lance Stewart as well as Tarzan, but he is undone by womanizing. Marriage to a manipulative fan ends in ruinous divorce, and Emilio abandons Hollywood stardom for work on an oil rig in Alaska. It is there that he meets and falls in love with Jessica Brooks. Their marriage is joyful, and Emilio is devastated when Jessica and their baby die in a fire. He eventually recovers from severe alcoholic depression to commence a new career in California as “photographer to the stars,” thereby resuming the family business that first brought Mariela Montez into the Santiago studio of Nelson O’Brien.

The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien is an old-fashioned collation of life studies, a patient record of moments from ten decades. Photography often provides its pretext for narration. When, at various stages of their lives, Nelson, who continues with his camera work even after opening the Jewel Box Movie Theater, assembles his family for a group portrait, Hijuelos proceeds to tell the story behind the picture. After Emilio retires from work in front of a lens and himself becomes a photographer, much of the rest of the story is generated by either the new prints that Emilio produces or the old ones that he ponders.

In the novel’s epigraph, Nelson explains to Emilio his preference for the archaic shuttered, folding-bellows camera that, as late as 1937, the older man still prefers to use, because it “captures not only the superficial qualities of its subjects but also, because of the time it takes to properly collect light, their feelings, as they settle on the subjects’ expressions; sadness and joy and worry, with variations therein, are collected on the plate.” It is a manifest parallel to Hijuelos’s own device for arresting the fleeting images of existence—the sadness and joy and worry, with variations therein, experienced by each of the O’Briens. For Hijuelos, memory is photographic, if imperfect, and his storytelling is inspired by and analogous to the photographer’s dream of retaining traces of light—and life—on paper.

The Characters

As a title, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien is a misnomer, or at least misleading. With an expansive, rhapsodic style, the novel celebrates fecundity, but it does not give equal time or attention to all fourteen sisters. Emilio, though not born until more than a third of the book is finished, is the object of as much narrative interest as any of the other O’Brien offspring. The first O’Brien child is old enough to be mother to the youngest, whom she in fact suckles as an infant.

Margarita is a creature of exquisite, insatiable longing, through sexual and romantic trials that span the twentieth century. Emilio is an Olympic philanderer whose brief brush with vulgar glamour suffuses the story with melancholy over mutability. He is graced by an acquaintance with Errol Flynn and enshrined in celluloid. Rather than three-dimensional personalities, most of the other O’Briens are types, for whom a simple set of traits suffices: Helen is a beauty, Irene “ever-plump” and omnivorous, Veronica compassionate, Violeta “pleasure-bound and promiscuous.”

Similarly, the non-O’Briens in the novel are foils to and extensions of the story’s central figures. Lester Thompson, the wealthy sadist whom Margarita marries, is a cad who serves to test and reveal his young wife’s qualities. Leslie Howard, the gentle, loving pilot she marries when she is ninety, enables the plot to circle back to Margarita’s girlish dreams of erotic fulfillment with an aviator. Emilio’s two wives are a comparable study in contrasts: Betsy MacFarland, who seduces him in Montana and soon traduces him in California, serves as an agent of cosmic retribution for the film star’s arrogance and philandering, while Jessica Brooks, the spunky woman he meets in Alaska, illustrates the possibility of true love and its fragility.

Aside from Margarita and Emilio, Nelson O’Brien, the family patriarch, is the novel’s most prominent personality. The plucky young photographer is crushed by the death of his beloved sister shortly after their immigration from Ireland. Thereafter, despite ostensible energy and cheerfulness, Nelson nurses a secret melancholy evident in occasional boozing binges and in fits of depression. He never entirely adjusts to his life in America and in a household of fifteen women.

Early in their marriage, Nelson plucks Mariela from her native Cuba and brings her back to Cobbleton, a foreign town that mystifies and terrifies her and where only one other resident, a Puerto Rican butler named Herman Garcia, speaks Spanish, the only language in which Mariela is ever comfortable. In part because most of them do not speak her language, the family takes Mariela in her role as dependable matriarch for granted. After Mariela’s death, however, Margarita discovers notebooks that reveal a complex emotional life none of the O’Brien children had suspected in their mother.

Yet nothing seems lost on the narrator. Hijuelos recounts the experiences of his characters from the perspective of an omniscient storyteller who has complete access not only to the events of their lives but also to their hidden hopes, joys, and disappointments. The book’s presentation of its characters is magisterial; it offers detailed, authoritative portraits of Nelson, Mariela, and their children as they develop over the decades.

Critical Context

The first book published by Hijuelos after the huge critical and popular success of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien was greeted with the attention and respect appropriate to its author’s new prominence. Like Mexican Americans Sandra Cisneros and Richard Rodriguez, Hijuelos owed his public success not only to talent but to timing and a Latino identity as well. His third novel, though, is an ambitious bid to transcend the Cuban American experience. Through the offspring of an Irish father and a Cuban mother, who blend “continents of blood and memory—from Saracen to Celtic, Scythian to Phoenician, Roman to pagan Iberian, African to Dane, a thousand female and male ancestors, their histories of sorrow and joy, of devastated suffering and paradisiacal pleasures linked by the progression of the blood,” it attempts to mine particular experience for universal treasure.

Bibliography

Birkerts, Sven. “The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien.” The New Republic 208, (March 22, 1993): 38-41. Birkerts reviews Hijuelos’s career as a symptom of multiculturalism in contemporary American culture. He finds The Fourteen Sisters an unlikely successor to The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love in both setting and narrative perspective. Birkerts finds Hijuelos’s premise unwieldy, his plot weak, and his portrayal of characters unengaging.

Castedo, Elena. “Shifting Contradictions, or What Is a Hispanic Writer?” ANQ 10 (Spring, 1997): 21-23. Castedo discusses Hijuelos’s significance as a writer who has established a Hispanic presence in American literature. She also examines the resurgence of ethnicity in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Fein, Esther B. “Oscar Hijuelos’s Unease, Worldly and Other.” The New York Times, April 1, 1993, p. C19. During an interview, Hijuelos states: “I consider myself a New York writer of Cuban parentage with different influences.” He insists that the O’Brien genealogy is as important as the Montez one and reveals that he was influenced not only by Gabriel Garciá Márquez but also by W. B. Yeats and Flann O’Brien, whose name is echoed in the book’s title.

MacAdam, Alfred. “The Long Pilgrimage Home.” World and I 11 (April, 1996): 264-271. Discusses Hijuelos’s novels, particularly focusing on The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien. MacAdam discusses the themes of emigration, dislocation of lives, importance of faith for survival, and redemption.

Mallon, Thomas. “Ripening in Pennsylvania.” The New York Times Book Review (March 7, 1993): 6. Praises the novel’s bountiful details and notes its bold sexuality. Contends that Hijuelos has created a realistic family chronicle that verges on the tall tale and applauds its willingness to celebrate joy.

Simpson, Janice C. “The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien.” Time 141, (March 29, 1993): 63-64. Notes the novel’s leisurely narrative rhythm and characterizes the book as a series of vibrant snapshots. Faults the novel for its portrayal of women in a dependent and nurturing role.

Span, Paula. “View from Another Room: Writer Oscar Hijuelos, Traveling Beyond His Window with The Fourteen Sisters.” The Washington Post, March 17, 1993, p. B1. Profile of Hijuelos that discusses his eagerness to explore another America, beyond New York and masculine sensibilities, in his third novel.