American writer Manuel Muñoz is a three-time winner of the prestigious O Henry award for short stories, and the author of the noirish, innovative and underrated novel What You See in the Dark. The 10 rich and resonant stories in The Consequences are set mostly during the 1980s, in California’s sprawling Central Valley, a fabulously fertile agricultural basin that generates immense riches for a few, and precarious, poorly paid work for those – mostly Mexican, or of Mexican origin – who labour in the fields in the shadow of La Migra, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service.
The opening story, Anyone Can Do It, begins with the sentence: “Her immediate concern was money.” Delfina is new in town. Along with other men, her husband has not returned from a day working in the fields, possibly seized by the authorities. Waiting on the steps of her house, she is approached by a woman, Lis, who proposes that they team up to pick peaches and share the earnings. Rent is due in a couple of days, and Delfina hesitates but agrees. With immense skill Muñoz tightens the narrative screw, showing how deprivation and desperation can lead to ignoble choices.
In a recent essay, Muñoz wrote: “I write fiction because I am often trying to get at the emotional mystery of a glance or an unspoken exchange or a decision made in a moment. Whatever might reside in the unsayable has always seemed most potent to me … ”
In Susto, a body is found in a vineyard around dawn by a foreman, the dead man’s head sticking out of the dirt. A Mexican man, too old to be working; a man, it seems, that no one knew. The discovery leaves the foreman “at a strange crossroads of sombreness and dread”. In the bakery he watches the old people, returned from church, buying bread. “Had they heard that it was not wise to love this world or anything in it?”
The unnerved foreman buys whiskey and goes home. That night, opposite his house, two red lights come out of the fog in the vineyard. He feels the ghost’s presence: “He trusted the buoyancy of the voice he knew he was about to hear, and he closed his eyes, hoping to understand what he had to say.” Through the patient, watchful accumulation of vivid detail the story grows into a lyrical, uncanny illumination of loneliness and community.
In The Consequences, insular Mark meets lively and attractive Teddy, and soon asks him to move in. When Teddy becomes sick (evidently with HIV, but not named as such), Mark’s lack of commitment to the relationship sharpens, and he asks Teddy to return to his sister in Texas. Mark never receives the call he expects from Teddy, in which he might apologise, and eventually discovers that he has died. He drives the many hours to the funeral, where he is not welcome, and where he finds the love that he could not feel while Teddy was alive. “Mark turned away…from the quiet, from the pleading … He began to weep. He hadn’t loved Teddy and yet now he did. He deserved this feeling.”
What Kind of Fool Am I? tells the story of Teddy/Teodoro from the point of view of his sister, Bea. Teo is a smalltown boy who cannot stay in the closet. Bea looks out for her kid brother, even at the cost of her relationship with Goyo, the man she loves. Teo runs away from home so he might live authentically. When he writes Bea a postcard from California pleading for help, she goes. “I wanted to explain to Teo why this was the last time and that I would never be a fool again.” But when she gets to Los Angeles, she decides that she will not carry on to Fresno, and Teo, and instead stay in LA to make a new life. “I was in sudden awe of myself for relying on luck.”
As Bea walks out into the lights of the city, the consequences of this decision for Teo, and for her, which we know from the previous story, arrive with the weight and revelation of a fable, exposing the long, indelible afterlives of our actions and inactions, and the ends which we cannot know. Muñoz brings tenderness and immediacy to these fully realised stories of secrets and concealment, longings, vulnerability, and imperfect escape, creating an expansive and memorable world.
• The Consequences by Manuel Muñoz is published by Indigo (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
