When we meet Riv del Rio, the narrator of Sergio De La Pava’s novel “Every Arc Bends Its Radian,” he’s getting off a plane in Cali, Colombia. He has no firm purpose there, though he has family in the city. Rather, he seems to be fleeing something in New York, and indeed, the story of what exactly he’s running from provides this deft, penetrating novel with its emotional weight.
In Cali, Riv connects with a cousin, who sets him up with a rich woman and a job. Riv is a private investigator who normally specializes in taking pictures of “cheap men leaving cheap hotel rooms.” But in Colombia, the profession seems to command more authority, in keeping with the dreamlike sequence of events unfolding on the ground.
The Cali job involves tracking down the rich woman’s daughter, a reclusive genius named Angelica Alfa-Ochoa. Angelica is missing, presumed dead, except Riv thinks something else is going on. So, we find ourselves in a detective novel, of a sort. Nothing in “Every Arc Bends Its Radian” is quite what it seems. Appearances are persistently, exuberantly unstable.
Riv gets to work — rattling cages at the local police station, visiting the Hall of Records, studying surveillance footage and tracking addresses through shady contacts at the phone company. His ingenuity makes for good fun, but it’s Riv’s attitude that truly distinguishes him as an investigator. His impertinence echoes Elliott Gould’s world-weary turn as Marlowe in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” punctuated with occasional demonstrations of Sherlock Holmes-like reasoning. It makes for a dizzying blend of styles, but Riv is on the trail of something more abstract than a missing woman. He is, at heart, an errant philosopher.
Appropriately, the novel’s chapters serve as a progression through modes of inquiry, complete with Arguments (“The relationship between the incidental and the momentous exists outside the scope of recollection”) and a cast of characters engaging in a stream of lively Platonic dialogues. And the dialogue, make no mistake, is worth the price of admission. De La Pava has an ear for language: the way it evolves and sometimes devours itself. The exchanges between Riv and his cousins, Mauro and Fercho, provide the novel’s funniest, most revealing passages, as English and Spanish meld together and the three men strive toward some shared understanding.
The trail eventually leads into the orbit of a notorious Cali criminal, more phenomenon than man: Exeter Mondragon, reputedly the source of all the region’s vice and corruption. (Cali, Riv is reminded by a hotel owner, is a haunted city in a haunted region; the hotel, also haunted.) The novel threatens to come off the rails with a series of confrontations between Riv and the evil forces lined up against him, and the story does somewhat lose its original shape. But there’s something admirable in its wild careening toward a world-encompassing finale.
De La Pava’s commitment to ideas — their creation and their interrogation — is so fervid that it lights up his prose. Riv wants to take us somewhere new, as intellectual strivers always want to, whether their stories are bound within a philosophical argument, a sweeping historical epic or a good old-fashioned detective yarn. It’s invigorating to be dropped in the middle of such an effort and to feel that whatever we might guess is coming next, the truth is likely to be much, much stranger.
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