The immigrant's story turned inside out : Daniel Alarcon

Daniel Alarcon's story in current New Yorker, "Second Lives," is one of the best of the crop of 20 under 40 that has carried the NYer through the summer. Alarcon has a very "mature" narrative style, careful and thoughtful, analytic and self-aware, without being self-conscious or grandiose - seems like an older writer, a classic style. Story follows two brothers, sons of immigrant parents living on student visas in Balto ca 1970 - older brother born in Baltimore and therefore a U.S. citizen; family goes home to unnamed Latin American country (I'm guessing Peru or Columbia, from some contextual hints), younger brother born there. As family suffers through the tribulations and inflation of a shaky Latin American democracy, older brother goes to U.S. to finish high school - but things don't work out well and he has to leave the school. The crux of the story is an attempt to have a neighbor bring the son a birthday present when she visits the U.S. - the neighbor suspects it's a package of drugs. What makes the story work, though, is not the mechanisms of the plot but the suprising way in which Alarcon develops character and setting: this is the immigrant's story turned inside out; we see the life of the immigrant son, wondering among various dead-end jobs, from the family left, enviously, back in the native land. It's like a mirror image of a Jhumpa Lahiri story - told by the ones who don't immigrate. The emotional focus is the younger brother, torn by envy for his sibling and concern about the sufferings of his parents (lost their jobs and savings during political upheaval and strikes), trying to find his way - he may go on to become a lone immigrant himself, an Alexander Hemon - or for that matter an Alarcon, about whom I know nothing other than this story.