46 pages • 1 hour read
Catherine Ryan HydeHave You Seen Luis Velez?
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Allusion to The Catcher in the Rye
In many ways, Hyde’s novel is the opposite of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye. Both books concern themselves with a teenaged boy from New York City who feels disaffected and searches the city for what seems lost and unattainable. While Salinger’s Holden Caulfield is a white, upper-middle class prep-school student in the mid-20th century, Hyde’s Raymond Jaffe is biracial and attends public school. His stepfather’s angst about Raymond receiving special treatment from his father prevents Raymond from enjoying monetary benefits.
Holden’s greatest desire is to save children from experiencing the loss of innocence that comes with adulthood. Raymond finds himself working to spare an older adult and a widowed, marginalized single mom from despair and lack of companionship.
Hyde herself is different from Salinger, who lived as a recluse in the Northeast and published a slim body of work. Hyde is frequently interviewed, lives in California, and has published at least two novels a year for several decades.
The Poetic Third-Person Point of View
Hyde tells the novel from the third-person point of view, as if looking over Raymond’s shoulder throughout the narrative, describing his actions, thoughts, and emotions. Unlike many contemporary authors, Hyde never departs from this point of view throughout the book. She occasionally slips into editorializing, most frequently when the storyline concerns spirituality. The narrative comments on the tepid nature of Raymond’s prayers just before he receives a major blessing and ends with a wistful comment, as if the author is waving goodbye and good luck to the two main characters she has created.
Hyde also uses poetic prose, sentence fragments, and dialogue to convey subtle characteristics of settings and interactions. For example, sitting in Millie’s living room for the first time, Raymond is struck by the filmy, dreary quality of the light coming through the window. He realizes this characterizes the lens through which Millie observes her world. Hyde uses single-word sentences to convey characters’ thoughts and actions, as when Raymond stands in front of his stepfather, waiting for any response: “Nothing […] “Still nothing” (2).
Invitations to Emotion
Hyde invites the reader to experience her characters’ emotions. When Millie, Isabel, and Raymond meet for the first time, with Millie grasping that Luis is dead, Hyde does not need to explain the grief they are feeling, as all three begin to weep. In simply describing the ability of the cellist’s music to summon sadness from the depths of the heart, Hyde does not need to express her characters’ emotions to make the reader aware.
However, Hyde describes Raymond’s fear. Raymond lives in a constantly anxious state and fears things most people wouldn’t. For instance, he freezes in terror when Luisa places her Saint Jude medal over his head. He often waits outside doorways, afraid to enter rooms and speak. When, toward the end of the book, Raymond is angry about being disrespected, there is no need for Hyde to explain: Most readers feel anger and frustration with him.
