Joy: A Novel

A story of happiness.

Ariston Letrero is a renaissance man- audio producer, insurance salesman, musician, composer, part-time fast food mascot, and a philanderer who quickly and quietly abandons his wife and son, Lucas, at the peak of his mottled career, for a new life in America with his lover Odette. Years and years later, he sends an email to his son, Lucas Letrero, an advertising man who has been brought up on super robot cartoons, Catholic school truisms, and a diet of fast food and loneliness, and who has reconnected with his childhood sweetheart Dedes, who has made a post-annulment life for herself in America. In the 30-odd years in between is a story that sings songs and anthems of identity, relations, loneliness, and loss, and how they figure in the lives of contemporary Filipinos who are not scattered across space and time, but who are also connected and separated at the same time. Joy is a story of joy-lived forward, backward, sideways, and upside down, in lives and loves that are fragmented, separated, gathered, made virtual, and made real.