Patron Saints of Nothing

Patron Saints of Nothing takes a significant formal risk by never directly introducing its thematic center, Jun. Save for a slender cameo appearance in one of Jay’s memories of a visit to the Philippines, and another brief appearance when Jay recalls a game played in the mud, Jun never appears in the narrative. Jun speaks entirely through the letters he sent to Jay for four years. Eventually Jay drifted from that correspondence, as part of his larger life strategy of maintaining a careful distance from others and allowing events to carry him along. Letters violate that sort of moat strategy. They are immediate, expressive, complicated, and involved.

Letters are an unexpected narrative technique in this high-speed, information-efficient culture, in which digital messages are easy constructs that are disposable and instantaneous (Jay, something of an instant-messaging addict, begs Jun to use email and IM). Letters represent a more studied, more complex sort of communication. Unlike the IMs that pop up regularly in the novel in squat bold lines, Jay’s letters stand out, formatted into pages of italicized print. They feel permanent, solid, and important. There is more gravity to a letter than an IM or an email.

Unlike IMs, which hide and even obfuscate emotions by reducing complex feelings and responses to telegram-like brevity, letters offer a chance to express complex emotions into developed sentences. Jay hangs on to Jun’s letters, and Grace actually steals them because in the letters they both hear Jun and feel his emotional complexity. In his letters Jun’s “voice rings in [Jay’s] ear, and his face floats in the paper just beyond his words where he swam in the kind of feelings and thoughts most people spend their lives trying to mask from others or from themselves” (13). The letters become a source of comfort. In an era when emails are casually deleted and IMs stay only moments on a screen, Jay clings to Jun’s letters. In those narrative moments when Jay pauses to read one of Jun’s letters, Jun himself steps into the narrative, sharing his voice, his street-hip slang, his adolescent chattiness. And in the letters Jun is able to explore questions that would be awkward to address in conversation and impossible to translate into instant messaging.

It is appropriate that at the impromptu family memorial service for Jun, Jay does not reminiscent like the others in the casual structure of conversation. He reads a letter, the letter he would have, should have, written to his cousin. This letter reveals how much Jay has learned, how ready he now is to accept what he could not accept just two weeks earlier. People are complicated, he says in the letter, but all anyone can do is the best they can. This is what Jun has shown him. But the letter also reveals Jay’s emotional evolution. His willingness to finally write this letter (it was Jay’s rejection of letter writing four years earlier that broke off his friendship with Jun) signals how much he now appreciates the depth and reach of real emotions.

It is a critical element of Jay’s maturation into awareness that he has no idea who Rodrigo Duterte is or what his short time as president is doing to his native country. Part of Jay’s education is his decision to Google Duterte’s name. Through internet sites and the posts on Grace’s Facebook page, Jay comes to understand the implications of Duterte and why his presidency, with its hardcore promise to reclaim Manila’s streets from drug users, represents a toxic threat to the freedoms and civil rights of the Filipino poor. But in drawing attention to this controversial figure in the Philippines, Ribay is not interested in fomenting resistance to the Duterte regime (although he includes in the book’s back pages a list of websites opposed to the Duterte presidency). Such resistance is short term. After all, oppressive, dictatorial, power-hungry autocrats come and go. The broader use of Duterte here is to emphasize why younger generations must stay in tune with real-time events in the real-time world and use social media and the internet’s information archives to stay informed. The narrative is less concerned with Duterte and more concerned with Jay’s indifference and ignorance.

Within the novel, Duterte emerges as an imposing authority elected in 2016 on the ultraconservative platform to take a hard line against the Philippines’ drug problem by vowing to rid the streets of drug users and sellers within six months using extrajudicial means. Within a very short time, Manila was policed by roving squads of masked police empowered to arrest, detain, and execute those even suspected of trafficking drugs. Human rights agencies around the world quickly took notice of the brutal crackdown, documenting upward of 20,000 deaths, mostly Manila’s poorest who turn to drugs in the absence of meaningful employment and sustained education.

It is Jun’s death and the urgent conversations with Mia and Grace that shake Jay from the lethargy of his weed-induced indifference to the world. As he scrolls through the photos Grace posts on Facebook, he responds with the first flicker of a conscience. This trip to the Philippines is not about Jun. Rather, Jun is suddenly placed in a context, becoming more than a cousin, more than a friend, but also more than a statistic. For Jay, Jun becomes a reason to engage, a reason to care. This brutal crackdown, he understands, is wrong. It does not address the base causes of drug addiction, the economic conditions, the living conditions, the lack of educational opportunities, or the reality of chemical dependence that makes habitual drug use a medical and psychological problem. Jay comes to view Duterte’s quick fix as an appalling simplification. Thus, Jay’s exposure to the Duterte regime show him the danger of simplifications and the need for complex, open responses to the problems in the world.

During Jay’s first days in Manila, Grace takes him to a mall where he and Mia go off together and visit, among other places, Manila’s Ocean Park Aquarium. Jay and Mia have just met, and the massive cavernous aquarium offers them a place where they might engage in minimum awkward conversation as part of getting to know each other. As they tour the exhibit tanks of fish and bright coral, the two pause at the jellyfish tank. They are mesmerized by the creatures, “floating around like aliens” (119), undulating with their threadlike tentacles backlit by UV lighting. That spooky lighting creates an atmosphere that suggests to Jay they are less like aliens and more like “ghosts” (119).

The thought gives Jay pause. There is a long and difficult “spell of silence” (119). Clearly thinking now about Jun, Jay shares with Mia a factoid he found long ago about a species of jellyfish that was rumored to be able to revert the aging process. When it reaches a certain age, its cells simply begin to rejuvenate and return the jellyfish to its younger state. Theoretically, Jay says, the jellyfish could live forever. However, he points out that this species of jellyfish seldom survive their first adolescence, they are slow and therefore easy prey. The implications are clear. Suddenly, Jay feels a deep washing sadness as he stares at the semitransparent globules hanging in the blueish light. Mia, seeing Jay’s emotional drop, makes a careless joke about people aging backward, and the two share a laugh.

The moment at the jellyfish exhibit is the first of a series of critical epiphanies that rock Jay’s confidence in his shallow perceptions of the world. The jellyfish symbolize the reality of Jun’s vulnerability. Jay confronts that reality through the story he shares about jellyfish that could live forever but die young. After an adolescence wasted slaying uncountable video game creatures, Jay pauses here to understand the absoluteness of real death and the hard reality of dying young. Unlike the urban legend about immortal jellyfish, people do not live forever, an obvious observation but one that separates children and adults. After this realization, Jay begins to develop a mature and adultlike perspective.

More important, Jay has been a loner who finds friendships awkward and lacks the easy social graces of his older siblings. Here, without the games that he plays with girls back in high school, Jay finds with Mia a consolation uncomplicated by irony. Mia, for her part, understands Jay’s moment and offers a silly joke to lighten the moment. They share a laugh, and Jay understands for the first time since arriving in Manila that he is not alone.