"Red Weather": Digging up the pieces of a buried past

"Red Weather"
by Pauls Toutonghi
Shaye Areheart Books,
245 pp., $23

The year is 1989, the Berlin Wall is crumbling and the Balodis family is going through a rough reunification of its own.

The narrator, Yuri Balodis, is a rebellious 15-year-old who looks out at the world through the prism of his books. His parents, immigrants from Soviet-controlled Latvia, are proud to offer their son the freedoms of American life — even if they dwell in the decaying urban landscape of downtown Milwaukee.

Yuri asserts his independence from his family by joining a socialist group and becomes infatuated with one of its members, Hannah Graham. Hannah happens to be the daughter of the group's leader, a media-studies professor at Marquette University with an "academic" understanding of communism. Dr. Graham is the perfect foil to Yuri's father Rudolfi, a janitor, ex-musician, alcoholic and ex-communist member, the "sting of the Stalinist past ... contained in the lines of his face ... "

The storm builds when Yuri commits a crime and withholds the truth from his family. And when four relatives visit from Latvia and crowd their small apartment, Yuri is forced to get close to his Latvian roots. Too close. After hearing story after story, walls between Yuri and his relations are toppled and Yuri eventually comes to embrace "family," KGB scars and all.

Pauls Toutonghi, a first-generation American, was born and raised in Seattle. Now residing in Brooklyn, he has a Ph.D. in English literature and was awarded the Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright grant and a Zoetrope Short Fiction prize, among others.

Toutonghi's debut novel offers unclouded observations into the Latvian immigration experience. Although Rudolfi's alcoholism can be tiresome at times and Yuri's sudden sexual experimentation late in the story seems out of character, "Red Weather" is a lightning rod of captivating humor, colorful characters and well-crafted prose. Make this your rainy-day book.