Discuss N. V. M. Gonzalez's writing style.

N. V. M. Gonzalez's first love and first job was playing music. As a young boy in the Philippines, Gonzalez earned money as a violinist at weddings. This background in music can be seen in Gonzalez's style of writing, especially in his poetry and fiction. Gonzalez has also stated in interviews that his second love after music was poetry and that it had set the foundation for his prose writing style.
This can be seen in many of his fiction projects and even in his essay writing. Like a musician, Gonzalez's narrative flow and word usage can sometimes veer off from a logical structure. It is similar to a musician improvising mid-song. The lyrical quality of Gonzalez's fiction has a musicality to it.
There are times when Gonzalez focuses heavily on the aesthetic of language or a sentence's musical quality rather than paying close attention to the actual story structure. This has led some critics of Gonzalez to note that his fiction works appear to lack a clear form.
Gonzalez's fiction stories often follow simplistic plot lines, which can contribute to his reputation for "formless" writing. It is not often that his long fiction works have complex subplots or heavily detailed backstories. Like his favorite subject—rural life in the Philippines, especially concerning the daily lives of farmers—his prose style is slow-paced and steady. Many of his works of fiction have a pastoral quality in which natural settings act like secondary characters. Critics have lauded this slow pace, because it captures the essence of rural life, especially in the Philippines.
A native of the Philippines and a self-proclaimed "provincial boy," Gonzalez is able to replicate the speech patterns of locals from rural communities and then apply those linguistic nuances in English translations. This not only adds further musicality to how his characters speak in novels but can also be considered an ethnographic type of fiction, in which hyper-local settings are depicted naturally and the people are portrayed true to life.