From the start, PERPETUAL WEST reminded me of DOG SOLDIERS, so it was no surprise to find Robert Stone’s name in the inspirations section of the acknowledgements. Stone, at his best, was one of the great writers of the 20th century. Consider this third paragraph from DOG SOLDIERS:
It was siesta hour and there was no one else in the park. The children who usually played soccer on the lawns were across the street, sleeping in the shade of their mothers’ street stalls. The Tu Do hustlers had withdrawn into the arcade of Eden Passage where they lounged sleepy-eyed, rousing themselves now and then to hiss after the passing of a sweating American. It was three o’clock and the sky was almost cloudless. The rain was late. There was no wind, and the palm crowns and poinciana blossoms of the park trees hung motionless.
Now the second paragraph of PERPETUAL WEST:
When they reached the border it was late August, evening, and still hot outside, but the sunlight was thinning. It fell through their car windows in long slashes that illuminated the dust on the dashboard, the cracked windshield, and expired inspection sticker—details that the police would eventually note in their report, atter finding the Honda abandoned in the Candy Club parking lot, but that was still four months away. On this August day the evidence suggested only that Elana and Alex were too poor to fix the windshield and too distracted to keep the inspection up to date. Behind them, a slope of treeless mountains hunched in shadow and before them, past the squat concrete bunker of the Paso del Norte border station and the brown gulch of the Rio Grande, Juárez rippled with headlights and neon signs.
At his worst, Stone—who was himself a notorious alcoholic and drug abuser—allows his drunken protagonists to occasionally take blame, but rarely responsibility, for the harm they do themselves and others. Similarly, Maren’s characters make one bad decision after another under the influence of mescal or cocaine or oxycodone or panic or lust. We feel Maren’s compassion for her characters, even as they fail to have much for each other.
Maren tells the story through three third-person (and past tense!) viewpoints. Alex, 21, was born in Juárez, but was adopted by a couple in the US as an infant. He’s come back to the border ostensibly to write a PhD thesis on lucha libre, the Mexican masked wrestlers, but in truth has returned to try to understand his identity as a Mexican. Elana, his 20-year-old wife, is escaping her suffocating family, including her incarcerated, emotionally troubled brother. They are both enrolled at the University of Texas at El Paso, but both spend increasing amounts of time across the border in Juárez, much of it with an activist collective, Kasa de Kultura. Meanwhile Matteo, a.k.a. El Vengador del Norte, one of Alex’s subjects, has just had his sponsorship picked up by the Juárez cartel.
Everyone, it seems, has been keeping secrets, and as a result, Alex disappears. Things go quickly downhill for all concerned, and serious consequences ensue.
Maybe the thing that seems most Stone-like in PERPETUAL WEST is that every part of its world has the weeds and scuff marks and broken windows of working-class reality. Maren knows the infinite distance between textbook Spanish and the slang of the street. She makes me see the hand-drawn posters on the walls of the Kasa and the women in its cramped kitchen. I can feel the vertigo of the bus ride over the mountains and hear the Norteña band at the cartel’s favorite restaurant. This is a minor thing, but typical–no one in the book ever says “Mexico City,” but instead calls it “DF” like the locals do (without ever saying what it stands for). As with Stone, the streets and clubs and stores have the casual authenticity that comes from long hours spent in their real-life counterparts.
I have complaints. The self-sabotage of drinking and drugging becomes tiresome. Some of the writing tries too hard to be Poetic. The plot spends too much time in idle wandering, in escapes and recaptures that accomplish little. The ending didn’t convince me that I, as a reader, now knew enough about what would happen next that I could close the book and go back to my own life.
Still, I recommend PERPETUAL WEST unreservedly. For its hyperrealism that has, sadly, fallen from fashion. For the barbed dialog that reveals buried resentments. For the great ideas that make the book smarter than it has to be, like Alex’s thesis that lucha libre presents the struggle between the US and Mexico in symbolic form; like the ongoing comparisons of the northward pull of the US to the westward migration in the 19th century; like the interrogation of Subcomandante Marcos’s philosophy and the references to Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. For that thing that great fiction does, taking you to another, fully detailed world that makes you think as much as it makes you feel.
I don’t think I will escape PERPETUAL WEST any time soon.
