The Tattooed Soldierprivate.

THE TATTOOED SOLDIERPRIVATE

By Hector Tobar. Penguin, $12.95.

I have never found a novel that introduces more of the issues I want to explore with my students than The Tattooed Soldier, a magnificent work of social realism written by Hector Tobar, himself the son of Guatemalan immigrants and now Latin American Bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. This is an overwhelmingly powerful and insightful fiction, one that becomes more relevant with every new development of the current "War on Terror."

The three main characters are Antonio, a vaguely leftist student in Guatemala City; Elena, the revolutionary woman he marries; and Guillermo, a young peasant who becomes head of the American-trained death squad that murders Elena and the infant son of her and Antonio. The novel opens years later, when Antonio, now living as an impoverished immigrant in Los Angeles, is forced to join the throngs of California's homeless. It reaches its climax when Antonio kills Guillermo in the midst of the riots touched off by the acquittal of the police who bludgeoned Rodney King. At the core of the novel are complex class and gender contradictions, the meaning of "globalization" for both its victims and its metropolitan centers, and intensely conflicted choices for individuals living within the global war of terror being waged by the American empire.

When I teach the novel in my course "Crime and Punishment in American Literature" to our diverse working-class students here at Rutgers University in Newark (labeled for six years in a row by U.S. News and World Report the most ethnically diverse university in the nation), I never know what aspect of the novel will ignite the hottest discussion. Sometimes it revolves around relations between the beating of Rodney King and the death squads in Central America or, now, in Iraq. Sometimes it's social class, with an interesting focus on the ex-peasant Guillermo, who was originally kidnapped into the Guatemalan army while watching a showing of E.T. in a village theater and whose own alienation becomes most revealing as the utopian vision of America he received while being trained in state terrorism at Fort Bragg crumbles amid the spontaneous disorder of the Los Angeles riots. This year, it was a raging argument about the meaning of revolutionary acts, set off by an Iranian student who harshly criticized Elena because her naivete about the nature of the state led to the chain of personal tragedy.

The Tattooed Soldier has everything a radical teacher might want from a work of literature.

--H. Bruce Franklin

Rutgers University, Newark