A PULPY NEW NOVEL HITS SHELVES
Nobel Laurete Mario Vargas Llosa pens a politically charged thriller inflected with touches of telenovela
The indispensable crime writer John D MacDonald, in one of his Travis McGee novels, remarked that “an austere orgy is no orgy at all”. The event that drives Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel, The Neighborhood, is an orgy that’s a character assassination. An influential Peruvian industrialist named Enrique is photographed in flagrante amid a heap of slatternly prostitutes.
He’s a decent man set up by his enemies. A tabloid newspaper is on him like a horsefly. When Enrique refuses to be blackmailed, the TV news blasts and headlines arrive: “Scandal in high society!” and “Naked Magnate Having a Snack!” He fears for his marriage and for life as he’s known it.
Vargas Llosa squeezes a fair amount of juice, and pulp, out of this conceit. Which is not to say that The Neighborhood is very good. It doesn’t rank anywhere near the four or five novels that made his reputation — these include Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982) and The Feast of the Goat (2001) — and helped secure him a Nobel Prize in 2010.
This novel, his 18th, is a broad entertainment, so broad that when the novel’s villain appears in the form of a tabloid newspaper editor you know him not merely because of his “ratlike little smile”. There’s also his “shrill, high voice” and his “small shifty eyes”, his “rachitic little body” and his yellow platform shoes, his “damp” handshake and his nicotine-stained teeth. Also, he “smelled of underarms or feet”. He’s a troll’s troll with a pimp roll, his shoulders swaying when he walks. We need Marty Feldman back to play him in the film.
The telenovela touches keep coming. When people are upset or frightened in this novel, their teeth chatter. Or they faint. Or froth at the mouth. Or retch. Or pee in their pants. This novel is no austere orgy of minor-chord emotion. Vargas Llosa, now 81, is playing to the balconies.
Below and beyond the tragicomedy, in this translation from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, Vargas Llosa is pressing a familiar point. He has long been a critic of tabloid excesses in Latin America, particularly so when the tabloids are manipulated by authoritarian political leaders in order to silence their critics.
Vargas Llosa has himself felt the sting of tabloid headlines in recent years, after he left his wife of 50 years and picked up with Isabel Preysler, pop singer Enrique Iglesias’ mother, and when his name appeared (erroneously, he has argued) in the Panama Papers, which exposed international tax havens.
No deep soil is overturned in The Neighborhood, but two things keep the pages turning. For one, it’s a confident book and confidence is contagious. It’s filled with cliffhangers — when the journalist is murdered, Enrique is the prime suspect — and overthe-top incident. For another, it is warm to the touch, particularly as regards sex.
This novel chronicles, in detail as damp as the bad guy’s handshake, an unexpected lesbian affair that develops between Enrique’s wife and the wife of his best friend and lawyer. The author seems to agree with Eve Babitz, who wrote that having affairs is the only creative thing most people will ever do.
Vargas Llosa’s novels have always been enlivened by earthy detail. I tend to think of him during flu season, recalling that John Updike praised one of his early novels for the way his characters caught colds realistically.
In The Neighborhood, the sex is hot and the beer is cold. His characters happily consume ceviche and tripe and pork rind sandwiches with onions and chilli peppers. They drink Campari and pisco sours. They eat at a seafood place called Seven Deadly Fins. In a novel as contrived and uneven as this one, the human touches go a long way.
Arriving alongside The Neighborhood is Sabers and Utopias: Visions of Latin America, a book of essays, most of them political, written over the past five decades.
In these pieces, Vargas Llosa considers the dubious legacies of leaders such as Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet and Papa Doc Duvalier. He champions free speech and liberal democracies. He deplores homophobia and applauds laws to legalise marijuana.
This book is, sad to say, all but unreadable. Vargas Llosa’s op-ed voice is not his best voice (it is few people’s best voice) and these pieces, read years after they were composed, are essentially dead on the page.
There are a handful of alert moments in these essays, which have been translated by Anna Kushner. In a 2012 essay, he deftly sticks a hatpin into Julian Assange. In another essay he considers the effects his generation — the Latin American Boom writers — had on the literary world. He notes, in a moving aside, that he’s among the few members of that group still standing.
Vargas Llosa has been a frequent critic of Latin America, but he sorely misses it when he is away. In one piece, composed in Switzerland, he asks what that country has given us except cuckoo clocks and fondue.
Latin America, on the other hand, has given the world “a Borges, a García Márquez, a Neruda, a Vallejo, an Octavio Paz, a Lezama Lima, a Lam, a Matta, a Tamayo, and we’ve invented tango, mambo, boleros, salsa, and so many rhythms and songs that the whole world sings and dances”.
Vargas Llosa is too humble, a rarity for him, to add his own name to this list of cultural treasures. So I will do it for him.