Michael Nava: tooth and nail survival

In 1986 Michael Nava published his first mystery novel, "The Little Death," breathing life into the first gay Chicano lawyer-as-detective, Henry Rios. Michael Nava hasn't stopped to look back since, churning out seven more award-winning novels that fully contour Rios's life as he solves grisly murders and crimes against the disenfranchised, has affairs of the heart, and struggles to survive in a xenophobic, heterosexist world. I met with the gracious, soft spoken, clean-cut Michael Nava at his office in San Franciso. With penal code books lying heavy on the desk, milagros hanging on the wall, and Giants paraphernalia filling up shelves, Nava and I discussed his life and fiction.

Tooth and nail survival isn't a fictional yarn for Nava. He grew up third-generation Chicano in "a tragically unhappy family," he recalls. In Gardenland -- a Chicano barrio in north Sacramento -- family life wasn't exactly fuzzy warm. Nava grew up estranged from his immediate family: his mother opened eyes to religion and turned a blind-eye to his stepfather's violent hand shooting sharply through the air of their one-room, breeze-block home. The sensitive and intellectually precocious young Nava knew that to survive he had to escape the cold walls. With his ABCs down, he increasingly sought refuge in the public library and at school. Book-smarts offered Nava weapons to survive everyday life in the barrio.

As home life threatened to limit experience, books would continue to expand horizons. One day in the library while leafing through a book on classical Greek sculpture, he recalls gleefully, "I knew I was a fag when I was 12 years old, so [laughs] I figured out early there was really no place for me in my family or in my community, and I would have to leave." As there were no positive Chicano role models in his life, let alone a Henry Rios "in my childhood" Nava knew that education would be his passport out. Teachers recognized his "exceptional ability" and pushed him to do well at school: "without them, I wouldn't have done it." Nava won a scholarship and made tracks for Colorado College where he put pen to paper and churned out the poems and fictions. At this point he knew he'd be a writer, just not an author of mystery novels.

Nava also knew that his B.A. in English was a stepping stone to a career as a lawyer. Taken with Abraham Lincoln and Perry Mason -- a show he'd watch religiously with his abuelo -- Nava says, "I wanted to be a lawyer from the time I was nine years old." Like the writer, a lawyer had the power to empower those like himself at the racial and sexual margins: "it's the disenfranchised who believe the most in the law because the law is the only thing that protects them."

The power of the fictional word and the law would converge in Nava in the early 1980s. Fresh with a J.D. from Stanford and a couple of poetry prizes under his belt, Nava moved to L.A. to practice as a prosecutor and to hone his craft as a gay Chicano Dashiel Hammett. (In 1995 Nava left glam and glitz to nest in San Francisco.) Nava resisted the impulse to write an autobiographical first novel, feeling that there was "too much about myself that I hadn't figured out." He turned his sights to the mystery novel because it offered a storytelling form that enveloped a hero who occupied the "same position in the culture that a gay man did." Namely, for Nava, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross McDonald invented detectives who were de facto outsiders and who were "loyal, decent, and courageous," -- figures who "embodied the virtues that the mainstream pretends to admire but seldom exhibits." Henry Rios would become the quintessential outsider and Nava's vent against a mainstream who reminded him daily that there was "something seriously wrong with me, that I was either sick or sinful."

While Nava's pen would flow, the publishing currents would resist. Fifteen publishers rejected "The Little Death." "They didn't think they could sell a book with a gay protagonist." It was picked up by the small gay publishing house, Allison. After the success of his second book, "Goldenboy" (1988), Nava found a demand for a crime-fiction world populated with those darker of hue and with a bent sexuality. Harper & Row (later HarperCollins) jumped on the bandwagon, publishing Nava's "How Town" and "The Hidden Law" (both went to paperback with Ballantine). Henry Rios's mainstream success led Putnam to pick up the contract on the last three books in the series, including "Burning Plain" (1997) where Rios wakes from an earthquake only to find himself file-deep in a murder case that involves a "straight" judge and his ex-lover, a gay porn star.

In Nava's latest and last mystery-suspense installment, "Rag and Bone," Henry Rios recovers from a heart attack, stumbles into a love affair with a working-class Chicano, and reconnects with a new generation of the Rios tribe. Nava closes the book on Rios as the once loner-detective connects with his long-estranged lesbian sister's orphaned daughter and her precocious son, Angel (Nava's middle name, not so coincidentally). Like Rios, Nava himself has "come around in my own life from feeling completely alienated from my family to being very curious about what connects me to them, you know, beyond merely an accident of biology." For Nava, "The Rag and Bone" is ultimately "about coming back to your point of origin, after you've spent your whole life evading it, and trying to find what's positive."

Nava's heartfelt characterization and lucid prose style probe prejudices that affect all of those who inhabit social margins: Latino immigrants, urban brown and white underclassers, victims of domestic abuse and alcoholics. However, Nava is careful not to simplify or romantically celebrate outsiderness. His novels both indict the mainstream for its homophobia that, he relates, "twists and distorts the lives of homosexual people in ways that are completely gratuitous and very ugly," and they are critical of, for example, "gay male subculture for its own pathology" -- a pathology that often prescribes restrictive ways of being gay in a world that divides rather than unites people. Nava seeks to create complexly contoured worlds that will eventually allow more human understanding.

After all, Nava simply wants to "wake up and not have to think about being homosexual; to be who you are without the distorting effects of social hatred or self-hatred." Still, Nava is skeptical. He sees the world "filled with people increasingly alienated from one another and where, instead of being citizens, we see ourselves as consumers that fight for resources."

He sees the demographic shift in California, where those at the margins (like Latinos) are becoming the majority, as a sign of possibility for change. Like the man in his novels, Nava does believe in a triumph against the odds.