The grandiose title of Nicolás Medina Mora’s first novel, “América del Norte” (“North America”), gives a good sense of its ironic tone and its unabashed desire to include everything on the continent, past and present: Hernán Cortés, Montezuma, NAFTA, the war on drugs, Trump, AMLO, José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, the murdered students of Ayotzinapa — even the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The book takes the form of a collage of short essays about these and other subjects, intercut with the story of its young protagonist, Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar, who is obsessed with history and his place in it.
Sebastián, like Medina Mora, is from the upper stratum of the Mexican elite, the son of a former Supreme Court judge who was also attorney general under Felipe Calderón, one of Mexico’s least beloved presidents. Character and author also share degrees from Yale and Iowa, and both spent time as journalists in New York.
As a narrator, Sebastián seems to think that his ambivalence toward privilege is what his story should mostly be about. “By the time my father became attorney general, he had 20 bodyguards,” he says. “When we went out as a family, we were surrounded by two dozen men, 10 assault rifles and several live grenades.”
Demographics and parentage, of course, should not determine our entire view of a person’s sensibility. But I did wonder how it felt to have that kind of protection and to live in that rarefied a world. Sebastián never really explores this, nor does he much delve into his father’s role in the war on drugs, even though his family legacy — he is a descendant of the conquistadors — preoccupies him.
In Mexico, he feels stigmatized as “white,” while in the United States he struggles to be seen as anything but a stereotype or a fetish of Mexicanness. We see him cast as the latter when a white American woman, Lee, a manic pixie dream girl of the ivory tower variety, shows up to dramatize it. Her romance with Sebastián is meant to provide a spine for this long novel, but the fraught historical context of their interethnic relationship — and what Sebastián has to say about it — is where the real heat is. The book even comes with its own bibliography, ranging from the Conquest to Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO.
“América del Norte” is a first novel, and while I often found Sebastián’s emotional life on the callow side, I was never bored by his company. Part of the reason was the brevity of each section, which made it easy to keep going, but part of it was more mysterious. I like short, tight, character-driven novels, and here was a long, messy one full of digressions and pronouncements, some persuasive, others not — a novel of ideas, in other words. And yet what I felt for it as I read on was growing affection.
Its portrait of Sebastián’s peer group in Mexico City, for one thing, is lively and complex. Another strength is the surprisingly moving depiction of Sebastián’s encounter as a journalist with a teenage refugee from Guatemala who has been through an ordeal that Medina Mora renders vividly.
Toward the end, Sebastián stops perseverating about what is appropriate to think and feel given his caste position and begins to simply think and feel. The teenager recites a psalm and Sebastián sees in his face a “knowledge … of the most difficult sort. In theory anyone could understand it, but to grasp it fully, as embodied idea rather than an abstract axiom, required the harshest and most exacting education.”
Maybe this moment, arriving so late in a book so insistently self-conscious, is calculated or even cynically concocted. Or maybe Medina Mora is a novelist full of promise.
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