What You See in the Dark

by Manuel Muñoz

The long-awaited first novel by the award-winning author of two impressive story collections explores the sinister side of desire in Bakersfield, California, circa 1959, when a famous director arrives to scout locations for a film about madness and murder at a roadside motel. Unfolding in much the same way that Hitchcock made Psycho —frame by frame, in pans, zooms, and close-ups—Mun~oz’s re-creation of a vanished era takes the reader into places no camera can go, venturing into the characters’ private thoughts, petty jealousies, and unrealized dreams. The result is a work of stunning originality.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Book Club, Mystery Thriller, Thriller, Crime

251 pages, Hardcover

First published March 18, 2011

About the author

Manuel Munoz's dazzling collection is set in a Mexican-American neighborhood in central California-a place where misunderstandings and secrets shape people's lives. From a set of triplets with three distinct fates to a father who places his hope-and life savings-in the hands of a faith healer, the characters in these stories cross paths in unexpected ways. As they do, they reveal a community that is both embracing and unforgiving, and they discover a truth about the nature of home: you always live with its history. Munoz is an explosive new talent who joins the ranks of such acclaimed authors as Junot Diaz and Daniel Alarcon.Manuel Muoz is the author of one previous story collection, Zigzagger. Originally from California, he now lives in New York City."

Reviews

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

What do you see in the dark? Well, that partly depends on your perspective. In Munoz's stylistic mise-en-scène novel, the second-person point of view frames the watchful eye and disguises the wary teller. Reading this story is like peering through Hitchcock's lens--the camera as observer's tool and observer as camera--with light and shadow and space concentrated and dispersed frame by frame, sentence by sentence.

Munoz applied the famous director's noir techniques to create a story about murder, madness, and longing amid the desire and antipathy of a working-class California town. Lives intersect, scenes juxtapose, and shades of gray color the landscape of the novel. Scenes of tenderness dovetail with acts of menace, plaintive music integrates with the rattling of chains, dark interiors annex the stark white heat of day.

In the hushed and dusty working-class town of Bakersfield, California, in the late 1950's, the locals jealously watch the fresh and guarded romance of Dan and Teresa. Dan is the rugged bartender/guitarist and sexy son of Arlene, a bitter waitress at the downtown café and the abandoned wife of a motel owner out on the changing Highway 99.

Teresa, a shoe saleswoman and aspiring singer, is the willowy Mexican-American daughter of a mother who left her to chase dreams of love in Texas. The narrow-minded prejudices of the town encroach upon the open bud of romance, and the ill-fated romance takes an ineluctable bloody turn. We know from the start that someone dies, but it is the why and how and where that sustains the tension of the story.

At the height of Dan and Teresa's love story, the glitter and fantasy of Hollywood comes to Bakersfield as the crew arrives to shoot select scenes of a revolutionary new film. The unnamed Actress and Director reveal themselves implicitly through details of the unnamed film-in-progress. It was evident when they scouted exterior shots, and during an illustrious scene with the Actress.

The interior monologues of the Actress and the frame by frame shoot of that most renowned scene in movie history is worth the price of admission alone. It felt as if Munoz had been standing next to the Director. The author's interpretation of historical data are transposed with polished clarity into film as words, and the searing silences that Hitchcock is so famous for lands on the page in the spaces between passages.

There are superbly captured details and Hitchcockian motifs that add subtlety to the story and incite the reader's suspense, such as stairwells, keys, mothers, blondes, confined spaces, as well as loss of identity and optical symbols. The plate glass window of the café serves up a film frame metaphor (and the lens of a camera). Moral ambiguity, mirrors, bars and grills, and kisses, and of course--the MacGuffin, are all woven in with care and control.

My primary criticism is that the narrative is dry and cerebral, but this may not be an issue of concern with other readers. I was academically stimulated by the author's style and complexity of techniques, but occasionally it felt studied and detached. The muted coolness kept me at a distance; I wasn't emotionally engaged, but I was intellectually absorbed. The frequent jump-cuts were its strength, but also its drawback.

So what do you see in the dark? The eyes, said Hitchcock, the eyes said it all.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won this book from a Goodreads giveaway, and was eagerly anticipating its arrival. Unfortunately, it left me a little disappointed.
While its premise was certainly intriguing, it never managed to suck me in to the story. Instead, every time I would put it down, I never had a desire to pick it up again - it was more like a chore, a homework assignment. When I read a book, I like it to carry me away somewhere - a storyline to get lost in. I never felt that here. I will say that the final third of the book was much more enjoyable to me than its beginning. However, it certainly wasn't enough to save this one for me, sadly.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two very distinct story threads in this debut novel from Munoz. It is set in Bakersfield, California, just 100 miles from LA, and set in 1959. One of those threads centres around characters from the town, notably Arlene and her son Dan Watson, who run a motel just out of town on the Fresno road. Young Dan takes up with a girl who works in a shoe shop, and the two of them make a name for themselves locally singing as a warm-up act before dances. The late 1950s were an exciting time of change for music, and that plays a big part in the novel, Patsy Cline, The Everley Brothers, Paul Anka, amongst them. But this is also a thread of murder and misdemeanour, though it is certainly not a crime novel.

The second part of the novel, told in alternate chapters, is related to the making of the film Psycho. A lead actress arrives in Bakersfield along with Alfred Hitchcock (though neither are actually named) to spend a few days scouting locations, specifically motels. 1959 was also an exciting time for movies, especially in Bakersfield, being so close to Hollywood. One of the best scenes in the book is at a drive-in theatre.

As interesting as both stories are, they remain quite separate. The book is in effect two novellas with a connection, but it’s very different, has strong characters, and the late 1950s is an enthralling time for it to be set.

[Kkraemer · Rating 4 out of 5]

"She was a waitress. She was a motel owner. She was a mother. She was an abandoned wife. She served coffee. She had a brother whom she loved from a great distance, yet never saw again. Her name was Arlene. She served pie."

I loved this book. It is about a part of California that few know about. Bakersfield is the first big town north of the LA basin. It's far away from the coast and, until politicians and money brought northern California water to the area, Bakersfield was known only for its desolation and its oil fields. Bakersfield, mostly, resembles the less attractive parts of Oklahoma. It has long served as the launch point for country music acts.

This is a story of Bakersfield and the way of thinking that can come from living in such a place in the late 1950's.

Arlene, the waitress, is the viewpoint into the world of change. She had thought that getting married, raising a son, and becoming a venerated part of the community would be her fate. She was wrong. She's wrong, too, about how people live and what they do. She cannot stand the reality of the movies.

Teresa, with her Latin background, her work ethic, and her attraction for the handsomest cowboy in town, is a counterpoint to Arlene. She, too, wants the traditional arc of a woman's life in Bakersfield, but her mother's life is a cautionary tale for her. She cannot stand the current reality, and she ponders life through music. Entertainment may be her fate.

The Actress and the Director land in this little corner of the world, so intent on creating art that they miss the drama. They talk with people, scout out locations, sweat, and make art, and when their art is shown in town, it is somehow conflated with reality. Bakersfield, meanwhile, is alternately concealed by fog and blasted by the 110+ degree sun that reveals all.

Munoz is a great writer. His prose shimmers and his story is structured in a way that resembles one's thinking process on a very very hot day, where everything is connected and then immediately becomes part of the fog.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

When a famous actor and director arrives in Bakersfield, California (1959) scouting film locations for an upcoming movie about madness, the local gossip columns begin to speculate why they are here. However, when a murder at a roadside motel is discovered, this dusty, quiet town is turned on its head. Unfolding the same way the Hitchcock’s movie Psycho, almost frame for frame. No one ever predicted that life would rival anything that this director could capture on the screen.

Manuel Muñoz has been dazzling the world with his short story collections for a while now, often been compared to Junot Díaz or Daniel Alarcón. What You See in the Dark is his debut novel and it explodes onto the scene to explore the deliciously sinister side of desire. Heavily influenced by Psycho, Muñoz tries to capture that iconic feel of this classic movie.

What I found fascinating about this novel is the way it did try to mimic Hitchcock’s Psycho, trying to capture the feel and style. While it does not always work I was very impressed with just how much did translate to the page. Manuel Muñoz is a very impressive writer and I went into this book expecting something light and fluffy but ended up being captivated by the style.

What You See in the Dark is a very stylistic novel that tried and often succeeded in playing with the imagery, however it often did stick to what novels do far better than movies, and that is the internal monologues. The book is not without its flaws, there are times where it tries too hard at mimicking Hitchcock and there are other times where it feels flat or dry. In the end, this was an enjoyable book with a perfect title. What do you see in the dark? Hitchcock knows and he has the answer.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2015/...

[Jo Ann Sharkey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reads like a collection of short stories. Each chapter tells a story that reveals a little more about the sometimes mysterious, sometimes dreary, but always changing, town of Bakersfield, CA. The novel started a little slow for me, but by the time I had made it through two-thirds of the book, I couldn't put it down. When I finally finished Munoz's novel, I couldn't decide how I even felt about his story or if I even understood what had really happened. I was frustrated with what I perceived as the story's inconclusiveness, but the longer I thought about it, the more I liked his approach to story-telling. Why shouldn't the reader by left to wrestle with the story that he or she has committed so much time to read?

This wasn't the finest novel I have read or even the most gripping mystery. But, what makes it worth reading is the way that Munoz weaves the lives of three or four different women together through his story-telling to reveal the way that love drives us, stifles us, traps us, and liberates us to do beautiful, but also terrible, acts.

[K.M. Soehnlein · Rating 5 out of 5]

A man and a woman eat lunch in the window of a diner, in Bakersfield, CA, in the late 1950s. Another woman watches them through the glass, noting their body language: a romance is developing between them. But soon that first woman will be dead, the man will leave town, and it will be up to the reader to try and understand what happened and more importantly, who these people were.

Another woman, known only as the Actress, is on her way to Bakersfield from LA. She's going to shoot some scenes for a movie that sounds a lot like "Psycho." She eats at at that same diner, is observed by some of the same people. Her waitress is the mother of the man who was eating lunch in the previous chapter, the one who will leave town. The connections start to form.

This novel is not a "mystery" in any standard way, though there's an unsolved murder at the center, and it's not a horror novel, though it does take on the filming of "Psycho" through some chapters that give us the Actress's (Janet Leigh's) point of view. What it is is a series of portraits of these various women, loosely linked to each other and shaped by these two murders, one "real" and one "fictional" (but which is which, the novel seems to ask).

This book was so unexpectedly involving (unexpected because I knew nothing about it before I read it). Its characters were so convincingly real, even the fictionalized portrait of Leigh. Munoz writes with both great visual style -- you can see everything so clearly, as on a movie screen -- and masterful emotional depth. The book is full of feeling, even as it avoids easy interpretation of what motivates us. Serious readers of character-driven fiction (and Hitchcock fans) should not miss this.

[Jenny Shank · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/...

Lights, Camera, Action: Manuel Muñoz’s Novel Reimagines ‘Psycho’ Filming
An entrancing first novel by Tucson's Manuel Muñoz.

By Jenny Shank, 5-09-11

In Manuel Muñoz‘s entrancing first novel What You See in the Dark (Algonquin Books, 251 pages, $23.95), a character called The Director, based on Alfred Hitchcock, observes, “Small towns are filled with people who notice every little detail.” Muñoz, who teaches at the University of Arizona, has paid utmost attention to detail in this novel that reimagines the filming of Psycho in the sleepy town of Bakersfield, California in 1960. Muñoz sets the filming of that classic movie against the murder of a young woman that occurs at the same time.

Muñoz writes with exquisite control of atmosphere, mood, perspective, and image—not unlike Hitchcock’s technique—as he builds the moving story of the murder of Teresa, a young Mexican woman, at the hands of her white lover. The narrative switches between several perspectives, beginning with a skillful second-person collective voice that we come to learn speaks for the town of Bakersfield in 1960 as a whole, and also for Candy, Teresa’s jealous co-worker at the shoe store.

The entire town watched with fervent interest and disbelief the development of a romance between Teresa, a quiet, petite shopgirl who lives alone, and Dan Watson, “the most handsome man in town for sure.” Dan is the son of Arlene, who owns a motel outside of town and works at the diner. In a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, the story of Teresa and Dan provides a movie-like drama for everyone to observe and gossip about. Like film stars, Teresa and Dan are the people who make other people dream, even though Muñoz shows us the entirety of their lives are not the stuff that dreams are made of.

Next we see the town through the third-person perspective of Janet Leigh, a talented, dedicated actress, a little unsure of how important her role in Hitchcock’s movie will be, since her character is to be killed before the film is halfway finished. Muñoz captures her preparation, her nervousness about meeting Hitchcock, and her hesitancy to be seen in a bad girl role, carrying on an affair and wearing nothing but a bra in several scenes, at a time when such things still shocked. Leigh, known only as “The Actress,” eats in the diner, where Dan’s mother Arlene serves her, and the Hollywood-obsessed young women who work at the diner study her. The girls pore over movie magazines and dream about the glamorous world down the road that is so removed from their existence.

Film buffs will enjoy The Actress’s sharp anaylsis of Hitchcock’s technique: “That was the way the Actress saw it anyway, mesmerized by how he was stripping out all the trappings of the industry and pushing these women toward something beyond even acting, something nakedly cinematic—postures, poses, gestures, as if the women were in magazine ads come to life for just split seconds at a time, just enough motion for the public to remember them as images and not characters.”

What You See in the Dark also includes sections from the third person perspectives of Teresa, Hitchcock (known as “The Director"), and Arlene, each constructed with utmost empathy and precision. Teresa and Arlene’s stories are equally heartbreaking. Here is how Arlene thinks of herself: “She was a waitress. She was a motel owner. She was a mother. She was an abandoned wife. She served coffee. She had a brother whom she had loved from a great distance, yet never saw again. Her name was Arlene. She served pie. Her name was Mrs. Watson. Her name was Arlene Watson before and during and after.” The Director and The Actress drive up to Arlene’s motel and observe it. The Director’s crew then reconstructs one like it on a studio lot for the Bates Motel.

Meanwhile, Teresa goes suddenly from living a lonely, almost unnoticed existence to being at the center of the town’s attentions when she starts dating Dan and performing as a singer at his restaurant. In one scene, while she completes the inventory at the shoe store, she thinks about how the town is taking her life in and judging her: “Teresa went back to her inventory. I know you, she kept hearing as she counted out pairs of sandals she remembered having ordered a year ago. I know about you, she imagined Candy saying, and there it was—just the additional word, the single key and the lock turning for a door that revealed everything about Teresa in glaring light: her father gone, her mother following, money scarce, the men below her window whistling. I know all about you, she tried, this time her own voice saying it, repeating it, as she counted out white shoes favored by the nurses at the hospitals, tasseled flats in elderly beige, pink canvas sneakers, dancing shoes with glittery straps and heels as thin as expensive vases.”

Muñoz has artfully constructed his narrative to provide a compelling story, but also to question the notion of story itself, asking, as Hitchcock did, how much violence and sex should be seen on camera or on the page, and how much should be merely suggested, allowing members of the audience to fill in the blanks with his or her own imagination. In Psycho, you never see the actual murder—you see the silhouette of a knife, hear Janet Leigh’s screams, and see the chocolate-syrup blood running down the drain of the shower.

Although What You See in the Dark includes many intriguing characters, references to film history, and a tragic doomed love story, it is also a book that is deeply about place. It’s about the town that Bakersfield was in this era, how it changed when a new highway was built, funneling business away from places like the diner and Arlene’s motel, and about the subtle racial tension that existed then as now, with Mexican day laborers gathering before dawn to seek work in the fields, the town complicit in this ritual, needing the Mexicans to fill the agricultural jobs, but also wanting them to keep to their shadowy place in the sunrise and dusk hours, out of sight. When Teresa and Dan cross the subconscious line that has been set out by the town, no one can believe it, and no one is truly surprised when it doesn’t end well. Muñoz plays all these notes with great subtlety and beauty.

What You See in the Dark is a poised and gripping novel by a writer who was awarded a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award in 2008 for promising writers at the early stages of their careers. With this novel, Muñoz has fulfilled that promise.

Manuel Muñoz will discuss What You See in the Dark at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on May 11 at 7:30 p.m.

An Interview with Novelist Manuel Muñoz

By Jenny Shank, 7-25-11, for NewWest

"The best way to defeat a notion that one’s writing is 'regional' is to keep demonstrating that any manner of story can take place there."

Writer Manuel Muñoz grew up in Dinuba, California. Beginning in fourth grade he worked alongside his family in the fields, harvesting grapes. He was a good student, and according to his website, he applied to Harvard “for no other reason than I knew the name.” After he graduated from Harvard, he earned an MFA in creative writing from Cornell and worked in the publishing industry in New York. He wrote and published two acclaimed story collections, 2003’s Zigzagger and 2007’s The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. Since 2008, Muñoz has taught in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Muñoz’s honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a NEA Fellowship, and an O. Henry Award. Muñoz’s dazzling new novel What You See In The Dark reimagines the filming of Psycho in the sleepy town of Bakersfield, California. Muñoz sets the filming of that classic movie against the moving fictional story of the murder of Teresa, a young Mexican-American woman, by her white lover. I recently interviewed Muñoz via email about the inspiration for What You See In The Dark, his love of books that “honor the sentence,” how a small town that seems to have nothing “actually has everything,” and Tucson’s literary scene.

New West: What first inspired What You See in the Dark?

Manuel Muñoz: I had many inspirations for this novel, but one I haven’t spoken about much is a dream I had. I’m not a believer in dreams as anything metaphysically significant; it’s just the brain’s way of clearing out the day’s debris. But one night, I had a dream of walking into an empty room and a woman was sitting on a bed, smoothing out the beautiful baby-blue cowboy skirt she was wearing. When I woke, I tried to recall where I might have seen that image—a TV commercial or a flash of something while flipping channels—but I came up empty. But the image stuck, so I wrote it down. It soon became a simple question. Who is she?

NW: Can you describe your writing process? How was writing a novel different than writing short stories?

MM: Most of the books I enjoy privilege mood, tone, language, and nuance over plot. Plot rarely excites me, except when it’s so airtight that its inventiveness is its own reward. I get much more excited by books which honor the sentence, and that’s what I try to do. Short stories have always given me to room to keep plot small. It’s much harder to do so in a novel—plot has to be at least one of the mechanisms for momentum. The revision process is much harder because one small change ripples through a much greater structure. That’s why I find short-story collections much more enjoyable to both read and write: if a style, a character, a time frame, or an event really isn’t grabbing my attention, something else can change.

NW: What research did you do for this novel?

MM: I watched a lot of Hitchcock’s films, less for the plot than for the camerawork. I watched how he dictated a scene, how he observed it, and this helped tremendously in giving my novel the right balance of interiority and cinematic feel. In researching Bakersfield, I’m lucky that I come from a place where change happens quite slowly. Many of the buildings in Central Valley downtowns are still very much like they were in years past, so it was easy to step into one, hear the creaky wood floors, and summon myself into the TG&Y of my 1970s childhood. Even then, it was already an outmoded store, trying its best to hang on.

NW: What did you discover about Bakersfield in 1959? You said in one interview that Bakersfield was a music industry hub then—I’d never heard of that. Did you look at photographs or read histories?

MM: I knew that Bakersfield held its hometown hero, Buck Owens, in high esteem, but it was only in reading about its music scene in the 1950s and ‘60s that I found out just how big it was. Given how close Bakersfield is to the stardom of Los Angeles, this shouldn’t have surprised me. Newspapers were quite helpful, as were archival entertainment magazines from the era, in capturing the “look” of the environment. For the social attitudes of the era, I simply asked questions of people who had long lived in the Valley. While it was clear that people had different views of the Valley depending on their ethnicity and/or social class, nearly all of the older people I talked to shared a certain conservative attitude—an idea of acting “properly,” so to speak—and that this shared sense of propriety, by their view, disappeared during that time.

NW: Parts of the book are written in the third-person perspectives of Teresa, Arlene, The Actress, and The Director, and parts of the book are narrated in second person, a perspective that seems to stand in for the views of the town as a whole, but also for Candy, Teresa’s jealous coworker at the shoe store, in particular. How did you come up with the voice of the town for these sections and why did you decide to use second person for them, instead of, say the first-person plural “we”?

MM: I think readers are sometimes too quick to dismiss the second-person as a set of instructions, as if using the “you” might not serve a purpose specific to a novel’s structure. In my novel, I think the “you” fit in perfectly as a foil to Psycho’s strange narrative device of having Marion Crane imagine the discovery of her crime. We see a shot of her driving the getaway car, but hear the discovery as a voiceover. It’s impossible for her to know this is happening, but her face registers a reaction as if she were listening!

That’s what got me to thinking about how we narrate moments in our heads. I ask friends whether they use “I” or “you” when they talk to themselves (“I better hurry up” or “You can’t forget to buy milk”). Either way sounds crazy, but I like how demanding that “you” can suddenly become. That’s why it felt perfect for the character of Candy. The “you” is really a voice of self-contemplation, a private, jealous voice that not even the first-person “I” can really accomplish.

NW: Were you influenced by the structure of Hitchcock’s Psycho in the way you structured your novel? I’m thinking especially of the way he never shows the actual murder of Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh)—he shows the moments surrounding it, so the audience remembers having seen it.

MM: Actually, no. The more I studied the film, the less I liked it. It’s an outstanding moral mystery, but once the shower scene is over, it becomes a chase story. I admire the crafting of the shower scene as much as anyone, but I also see the film as a deliberate refusal of character. The shock, to me, wasn’t that a woman was murdered in the shower, but that the character of Marion Crane was killed. I’m not entirely convinced that Hitchcock was entirely invested in Marion Crane as a woman, as a living person. It’s a strangely neutral scene in some ways, as evidenced by the shot of that shower head, peering down as the scene goes on. I tried my best to reject that idea in my novel, to insist to readers that knowing why a murder happens does nothing to change the fact that a brutal event has occurred, that a life has been taken violently.

NW: I admired the subtlety with which you depicted relations between Latinos and whites in Bakersfield in 1959. Although it’s never stated, you sense that part of the reason the town appears to disapprove of the relationship between Teresa and Dan Watson is because she is Mexican-American and he is white. The town accepts the role of the Mexican men who wait outside at dawn for jobs in the fields, but when they cross out of their accepted place, there are consequences, as there were for Teresa’s former Mexican suitor, who was deported. Did you consciously decide that you would address race in a peripheral way in this book, or did it just turn out that way in the telling of the story?

MM: I absolutely did aim for subtlety. Such tensions have nearly always come from small moments in my books. Part of this is a reaction to how narrowly some readers conceive of Chicano literature, that it’s a body of work in which characters exist first and foremost in their ethnic or racial identities rather than in the invented lives I could grant them. Most readers are smarter than that. We can intuit those tensions quite easily in real life—all of us silently judge—so I saw no reason to be explicit on the page.

NW: The character based on Alfred Hitchcock, know as The Director, thinks, “Small towns are filled with people who notice every little detail.” You grew up in a fairly small town (Dinuba, Calif.). Do you credit growing up there with your attention to detail?

MM: I was lucky to grow up there. It taught me how to watch and listen. In another interview, I stated that the Valley is a place of observers, a place where neighbors watch neighbors. Because change comes so slowly, the thirst for change is rewarded only by one’s patience. You have to keep looking, you have to keep watching, like staring at a pot of water until, soon enough, it all starts to boil. I learned very quickly that a place that seems to have nothing actually has everything, if you just look carefully.

NW: Your three books have been set in California’s Central Valley. Do you think you will continue to set work there?

MM: I really do hope so. In terms of immediate market appeal, I know that it isn’t the sexiest of places and that I run the risk of being deemed a regional writer. But the Valley is so historically important to Chicano/a literature that I feel I must continue to represent it with as many facets as possible. The best way to defeat a notion that one’s writing is “regional” is to keep demonstrating that any manner of story can take place there. Do so successfully, and you’re suddenly an American writer, no questions asked.

NW: Your two story collections had many characters whose biographical details matched your own. In What You See in the Dark the characters appear to be very different from you—three women (two of them white), and one white British man. Was it more challenging to write from such different perspectives? Or was it liberating?

MM: I found it very liberating, if only for the simple reason that I could get the autobiographical monkey off my back. I liked the challenge of showing that I had my own set of compulsions that might not be the subject matter of any other Chicano/a writer, which satisfies me greatly. As much as I want to identify with this literature, I also want my individual aims and ambitions to be considered and debated. If that happens, I hope it can lead to an investigation of my earlier books with an eye to theme, moral dilemmas, and style rather than the easier match-up of biography and place.

NW: You used to work in publishing in New York, and now you teach creative writing at the University of Arizona. Are either of those jobs better for facilitating your own writing? How do you balance the obligations of your job with your own creative work?

MM: Working in publishing was much easier because the work ended at five o’clock! Good teaching requires a lot of commitment to students and I find it very hard to refuse a student’s story, no matter how many drafts I’ve read. I just finished my third year of teaching and have found it very difficult to balance my own work against it. But I’m starting a fourth book, so I will have to adjust quickly if I want the work to move a little faster.

NW: What is Tucson’s literary community like?

MM: For the students, I think it’s wonderful. They have active participation in their graduate reading series at a downtown location called Casa Libre, which offers community workshops. Our Poetry Center is justifiably famous and one of the most beautiful places to hear a reader. Our Tucson Book Festival has already grown to be one of the biggest in the country: I’m really proud of the University of Arizona’s commitment to serving the public with this event.

NW: What are you working on next?

MM: I have some stories brewing and a novel is taking shape via notes, but it’s too early to tell. I’m still exhausted from What You See in the Dark!

[4cats · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are moments of good writing however it wasn't what I was expecting

[Glenda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just won on Goodreads! Sounds like an interesting story. Review to follow!
This novel weaves two stories together--one about a love affair that has everyone in town talking, and one involving a famous actress and director (that remain unnamed) coming to town to make a movie.
The entire town watched with interest and disbelief the development of a romance between Teresa, a quiet, petite shopgirl who lives alone, and Dan Watson, “the most handsome man in town for sure". Dan is the son of Arlene, who owns a motel outside of town and works at the diner. In a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, the story of Teresa and Dan provides a movie-like drama for everyone to observe and gossip about. As the story is told, Muñoz also addresses how much violence and sex should be seen on camera or on the page, and how much should merely be suggested, allowing people to fill in the blanks with their own imaginations.
Th writing was lyrical and well done, but I never really connected with the characters. I felt like I was an outsider looking in on these people. He has a unique idea though in how he weaves the two stories together, but I think this book is better for those who prefer style to story.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because it was written by my college Creative Writing instructor. I enjoyed Manuel's course, and I could hear him narrating his novel in my head, just as he had read some of his works to us in class. I enjoyed the book not for the story so much (the crime genre also not being my cup of tea), but for descriptive and revealing character and setting sketches. This is a wonderful element of Manuel's style, as is his ability to stick to a theme. It's great to see a short story writer be able to weave so many stories together into a common thread so well. The language isn't complex, but take your time reading this novel so that you can get the best feel for the setting, situation, and inner thoughts and motivations of the characters.

[Nancy Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the writing style, how it weaves in & out of itself through the perspectives of the different characters. & I love it when an author can paint an elaborate picture with just a few words.

A sample:

The windows of the house beckoned to her, but not warmly, not the yellow picture windows of her childhood storybook. They stared back at her with a cold, white gleam, and inside, Arlene knew, were years of empty rooms.

Interestingly, all of the main characters are women. It's refreshing to read female roles from a male author without the women ending up desperate for a romp.

[Lemar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muñoz brings a perspective of small town San Joaquin valley to this novel set in Bakersfield. Being on the other side of the mountain from the big city distills the desires harbored by these characters, even the minor ones like the girls working at the Cafe. The sense of "is this all there is going to be?" is furthered by the proximity of the city where dreams are made real. This novel has those moments of truly great writing that elevate good premise into a realized excellent novel.

[Steph (loves water) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent. If you want to know what Bakersfield, CA, was like in the 1950s, read this book.

This author's command of language was amazing. The prose is beautiful. I thought for sure he would be an older gentleman who lived the neon life of honky tonk Bakersfield, and was surprised at how young he was. I have a new favorite author, and I want to read everything this man writes.

This story will stay with me for a long time.

[Miriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this one awhile ago, but didn't get to talk to my book-club-of-one-other-person for awhile either. I didn't want to write down my thoughts before that. But even so I'm sure that conversation shaped my thoughts as well.

I found the writing sharp but in a jagged way. Difficult rhythms, purposeful awkwardness in places (like the awkward scene with the Actress and the driver). I thought that Bakersfield came through clearly: I could see the white sun, blinding streets. The atmosphere of a small(ish) town about to become something more or less with the highway coming through. The gossip and multiple layers, class and race explored subtly.

I don't think this had actually much to say ABOUT Hitchcock's technique. Anyone with passing knowledge of the big shower scene in Psycho knows how revolutionary it was. And recreating that on the page was...meh. The POINT is the visual, the sharp cuts. To write it all out renders it flatter. Or maybe that's the point? To say that this scene that everyone talked about is just cuts on film? That this hunger for violence, "what you see in the dark," is something IN us that the film just allows for its expression? If you don't actually see knife pierce flesh, but your brain fills in the gaps, are YOU the Psycho? But even that: isn't that part of the message of the movie (and of the later one discussed at the end, the only scene from the Director's perspective, about his later film)?

My only insight was: the girl from the store who seems like the centerpiece of the story dies early and we're left to pick up the pieces (like Janet Leigh in Psycho!). Dan's mother seems to have the hardest time, not because of her son's involvement but because of who she is. The backstory about her brother sets up her long-time desire NOT to know something, NOT to have something confirmed. So with the murder, even though Dan confirms it for her, she seems to exist in this semi-waking state in which she tries NOT to know. Tries NOT to have other people know she knows. And all of that blended not just with her family life but also her economic life and the motel and the highway coming through. When the farmer shows her and reaches out to her, she recoils. I understand that there are people (characters) like that, but I also couldn't understand her reaction: here was this man offering her love, affection, stability and she rejected him because...why? She wouldn't even let herself imagine a change, a different kind of future. It was very sad, but at the same time I felt little pity for such a reaction.

[Lauren Honeycutt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book read like fanfiction about the filming of Psycho, not “an unflinching examination of American violence” as the back cover claims. The bits about Psycho had been slotted within a main plot of an entirely separate murder, making the book just seem disjointed. I neither got to read any cool real facts about Psycho (just fictional facts that I will no doubt accidentally bring up as truth sometime later in conversations about the movie) nor did I get to focus on a story of a series of events leading up to a dramatic murder, since the author tried to shove these two barely related plots into one novel. Some strength lies in the concepts Muñoz brings up about being able to see the deep pasts and backstories in characters that people never dig to question deeper, but this idea is not exactly worthy of a whole novel.

[Kyle Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up right after the MacArthur Fellow announcement. As the author is officially a Genius now, I'll trust you don't need me to tell you the book is good. "What You See" does seem to have attracted the army of Good Reads reviewers who think "writing" shouldn't get in the way of plot, but I really enjoyed the style and structure. Made me feel like I was a part of the town gossip.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A creative novel overlaying drama from 1959 Bakersfield with an imagined location scouting trip by an "actress" and her "director" for an upcoming movie shoot. [Not giving anything away here, from the book's description, it's Psycho (!!!)].

Told mostly from the perspectives of a few of Bakersfield's women and the Actress, there's a murder or two, there's a motel, a cafe, there's a stretch of town becoming obsolete because of the new freeway being built. The way Muñoz overlays the small town fiction with imagined inner dialogue and the production of the movie is clever. The novel has a lot of atmosphere, small town rumblings, gossip, history.

There's an interview with the author in the version of the book I read, in which he's comparing the art form of novels to that of movies. He believes the movie director tells the audience what to think, leaving little to the imagination. Novels are a higher art form because the reader can fill in the blanks, the "what you see in the dark." He also takes a lot of digs at Psycho itself. Ugh. I wish I had left that whole interview unread. I liked what I read and didn't need to be told how to interpret it (pot, meet kettle).

[Amber Voigtlander]

Personal Review
I think the book was ok. It wasn't too interesting to read. The ending was more violent than I expected, and I think most people wouldn't like this. The book was a good book overall. It was interesting in some parts and I think it should be read more.

Plot
The main characters are Dan and Arlene. Arlene is going to find a guitar shop that wants her to sing for one of them, to bring in customers. After she finds the shop, she talks so the store clerk and the clerk knew her from his father. Arlene and Dan talked for awhile to get to know each other a little more. After Arlen sings on the street, she gets some money out of it. She also gets a cab the next early morning, and she talks with the cab driver about her in a movie. she and Carter go to a cafe and get some food. Carter drove her to see her at a movie set and take her out to get lunch quickly, and the director didn't like that very much. When she got back they started to film the movie, the movie was based on Psycho. After they got the movie all filmed the actress, watched herself get killed in the shower and she thought it was very realistic. The end of the book was violent, Dan killed Arlene in the staircase after the movie was done being filmed.

Characterization
Dan was friendly when he met Arlene, he was working with her and getting close to her. As the book went on, Dan started to get more aggressive towards Arlene. He would fight more with her and get jealous when Carter come and take her to eat for lunch. And he snapped at her and killed her.

Recommendation
I recommend this book to the ages of 16-30 just because it had some gruesome parts at the end of the book. The younger ages wouldn't really understand what was going on in the book either. If some people don't like old time type of books they wouldn't like it.

[Alexa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a 3.5 ish. There were parts that had me really engaged and others that I was practically falling asleep. It was interesting to read a cast of female narrators written by a man and to see how he wrote them. It wasn't unpleasant to read but I wouldn't read it again. I also enjoyed the metafictional aspects of it and a lot of the symbolism and imagery was quite interesting

[Jewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very excited to receive this book through Goodreads First Reads.

This book was extremely well written. You're like a fly on the wall watching several lives in Bakersfield, CA go on (or end) without them noticing or caring that you're there. A perfect explanation of this book is in a description of the shower scene in "Psycho" in chapter 9. "From overhead... the way God looks down at everything and lets it happen." That's how you feel reading this book, like you're just looking down on what's happening, but have no role or particular stake in it.

That's also the reason I gave only 4 stars instead of 5. There isn't a protaganist in the story and therefore no one to really care about. You observe as an outsider and never really feel like you're invested in any of the characters. That adds to the originality of the writing, though.

Definitely the kind of book that would do well in book clubs or literature classes. Lots to discuss besides just the basic plot. I'll look for more Manuel Munoz in the future.

[Rocco Versaci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really 4.5. This amazing novel--Munoz's first!--is set in Bakersfield, California, but the actual setting is that transitional time in America between the perceived "stability" of the 1950s and the disjointedness of the 1960s. Munoz explores this difficult terrain mainly through three women characters--a young Mexican woman in love with a white bartender, the mother of the bartender, and the Actress (Janet Leigh), who is in town to film parts of "Psycho." Munoz's use of this film is genius in that it--and in particular, the shower scene--was a watershed moment in American film (and by extension, the book suggests, in American culture). Layered, beautifully written, and demonstrating the author's gifts of inhabiting characters, this is a powerful book.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah! Such an excellent beginning, and then I'm not quite sure what happens at the end. Floundering perhaps? But the prose is amazing. Very worth it even with a strange plot. I think the problem was I couldn't stand the Arlene character (seriously - the sad, simple rural housewife? Haven't we all watched Bridges of Madison County enough?) and she took up a good portion of the final third. I get the hook with the movie being filmed, I suppose, but it seemed to not fit. The Actress was good, but the entire conceit of the movie was odd.

Still - a good read, especially the first third! You should try it out just for the lovely prose.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why, why, why would you write a fairly straightforward mystery novel, and decide at the end, when you must know your readers are filled with suspense, to write the last chapter in some kind of dreamy stream of consciousness, no one really knows what happened mess?

I didn't mind the sidetracking plot lines, although the author isn't very good at writing about women, but when I read a mystery, I want answers. I do not want random guesses of what might have happened from a character who was barely in the story to begin with.

Ugh.

[Stefanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book with so many plots it truly had none at all: a boy in love with a girl, the same girl in love with another boy, another girl in love with that boy, a mother with a murderer for a son, the filming of the movie Psycho. Each story is told in bits and pieces so the reader is left to piece together the chronology and the actual happenings. It's interesting, and lyrical, but aggravating because so much is imagined by these flat characters that it's hard to know what's real. Munoz spent so much time saying what didn't matter that in the end I felt like nothing did.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Manuel Munoz is a tealented writer, capturing the darkness of a film noir in a neat little novel. However, I didn't like the beginning and end chapters where the author speaks directly to you, as if you are one of the small-minded, small town women in the novel. It lent an accusatory air and was a bit of a turn off. Also, the characters lacked warmth and depth. Not bad for a first novel, but I like to feel that the author likes his subjects more than this one seemed to.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

What You See in the Dark intersects a once scandalous Hollywood picture with the equally lurid imagination of a small town as it deals with a murder and its own slow strangulation via freeway construction. I don't think I've read anything like it, and I admired its refusal to obsess meaningfully over shutter speed or aspect ratio, and focus on the seemingly mundane, and off camera choices that can make or break a picture-- or a town, however tangentially involved.

[Nathaniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this. So evocative, mysterious and moving -- beautiful prose -- and a must for fans of Hitchcock and PSYCHO. I interviewed the author after reading it which you can read here

[Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://wordnerdy.blogspot.com/2011/03...