Publishers love it when their authors get compared to literary greats in the book pages. A reviewer on deadline will toss off a Faulkner or a Fitzgerald, hoping it’ll be forgotten by Monday, like most of the copy, but then that little line will resurface in news releases and the paperback’s “praise pages” until it becomes a part of the publisher’s institutional memory and the author’s permanent brand.
In the case of Luis Alberto Urrea’s 2004 novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter, it was enough for the book to be a long family epic written by a Latino (Urrea is Mexican American) for reviewers to cry Gabriel Garcia Marquez. May differences in style and substance be damned. They even compared him to Jorge Luis Borges, about as far from the Colombian master as you can get.
In his new novel, Into the Beautiful North, Urrea let the champagne bubbles go to his head. He echoes the famous opening line from Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in the second paragraph, a glib mirroring: “Until 1936, ice came in big trucks, and fathers took their sons to observe it when it slid down the ramps in great clear blocks.” (The original speaks of “that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”) The bar for contemporary fiction shouldn’t normally be ratcheted up to this level, but it is Urrea who invites the unflattering comparison — and Garcia Marquez would never have written lines as twee as this: “Garcia-Garcia had a treat for them: cartoons!”
So here’s what the novel is about. Nayeli, a 19-year-old girl whose village in Sinaloa is beset by bandits, decides to cross the border — not to escape but to repatriate the Mexican men who’ve gone north so that they can protect the town. The bandits are narcos (which is all the scary rage right now), but aside from refusing to pay for their tacos it’s hard to see what danger they might pose here, or what they might want from this moneyless backwater off the trafficking trail.
So forget the premise — what about that old “willing suspension of disbelief”? Yet so much demands it. There’s no room for nuance here, only extremes: The Border Patrol agents are pretty much all brutal bastards, unless they have a heart of gold. Racist means skinhead with black boots. If you’re gay in this book, you’re a queen. All from central casting.
It is the gee-golly dialogue, though, that truly strains your will to believe. It shares with sitcoms a reliance on one-liners — and sometimes has its own built-in laugh track. Someone makes a joke and Urrea writes: “They slapped her high fives, always eager to reward her for saying something witty or pithy.” At one point Nayeli, a parody of feminine determination, actually channels Yoda: “There is no trying. ... There is only doing.” But perhaps the dialogue is not as embarrassing as the dialogue tags. In Urrea’s world, people “enthuse” things almost as often as they say them.
The politics are not a strain here. They could have strained more. The message is almost always preachy and obvious. A Mexican radio announcer decries the invasion of illegal immigrants from Central America, and the irony is abundantly clear: “What do we do about the Guatemalans? Have you seen the Salvadorans? Por favor! Keep them out!” In Mazatlan, we learn about the distortions of NAFTA in vegetable stalls that sell overpriced beans grown nearby, exported to California and then sold back to Mexico. “That,” one character enthuses, in case it escaped you, “is the stupidest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
Urrea spent 20 years writing his previous novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter. This book seems rushed. How else to explain lines like this one: “They were utterly alone in the vastness of this ridiculously immense land”? Or: “He ascertained to his satisfaction that she wasn’t begging for alms.” The Devil’s Highway, Urrea’s nonfiction work about a catastrophic illegal border crossing, was a finalist for a Pulitzer; it is serious, even harrowing in parts. With this book, what once was a terrible rite of passage for slews of dirt-poor Mexicans has become quick, easily digestible — even cute — fare. This is Border Crossing Lite.
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