Avenue of Mysteries

Roughly in the present day, Juan Diego Guerrero, a fiction author, travels from his home in Iowa City to the Philippines. On the way he meets a mysterious mother and daughter, who both seduce and guide him. Meanwhile, his dreaming self remembers his childhood in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the characters that peopled it: a garbage dump boss who was probably not his father, a kindly Jesuit brother who brought him books, an overenthusiastic American missionary and the prostitute he fell in love with, and, most of all, his sister, Lupe.

My heart is divided over this book. John Irving was born in New Hampshire and lives in Toronto, and pretty much all of his books are set in the North Eastern United States. It’s not clear why he set this most recent one primarily in Mexico and the Philippines (and a little in Iowa). I’m not saying white people can’t or shouldn’t write books set in other places; I assume this book, like many other, similar ones, was well-researched and largely accurate. I do question the wisdom of it in some cases, though. To be honest, the section in the Philippines wasn’t too bad, since Juan Diego was treated just like any other American visiting an Asian country. The Mexican sections, though, did feel a little awkward. In particular, Irving had a narrative habit of over-explaining the meaning of the Spanish words he used, which became intrusive and grating. A sensitive white guy writing a novel set in Mexico will ordinarily, and quite rightly, have a disinclination to offend anyone, and it’s hard to balance that against a need to write a novel that criticises aspects of its setting and/or characters. To Irving’s credit, the Mexican characters seemed to me to be well-developed and not handled with kid gloves. On the other hand, it is an inescapable fact that this is a book featuring a crippled Mexican orphan and his psychic sister, who grow up on a garbage dump and then join a circus where the sister is expected to interpret the lions’ thoughts.

Being an Irving novel, despite the different (for him) subject-matter, his fingerprints are all over it. The novel includes such common Irving stock as the long, long, long arm of foreshadowing; magical realist elements; clergy and religion treated as complex subject-matter while not subscribed to; and what I suppose should be called agnostic prophetic gifts. There’s a familiar shape to Juan Diego’s story which, if stripped of its Mexican element, does feel at home set against his other novels (or at least those I’ve read). There’a coming-of-age element, a kindness-of-strangers element, and an introduction to tragedy fairly early in the protagonist’s life.

I would certainly say the Mexican section of the book was more interesting than the section set in the Philippines, which was pretty much a giant yawner. (That’s a pun since, out of narrative necessity, the protagonist spends a lot of his time there asleep and dreaming.) At least there are some things that actually happen in Mexico. Hands down the best character is Lupe, the clairvoyant younger sister who is better at seeing the past than the future, can read minds, and can be understood by no one except Juan Diego, who functions as her translator. Even there, though, there’s a little bit too much narratorial focus on the significance of Lupe’s words, as though the author’s holding up a giant neon arrow and saying, “SOMETHING’S GOING TO HAPPEN HERE, GUYS! IT’S THE FUTURE SHE’S TALKING ABOUT!” We get it, Jack. We’ve read books before. Same goes for the protagonist fiddling around with his prescription medications, to which attention is drawn approximately every four paragraphs. Could it possibly be significant?

In conclusion, this was a book. Events happened in it, to characters who were also in it. Everything I’ve said above is fairly useless and amounts basically to a neutral outcome. Do whatever you like. At least there are lots of dogs in it.