Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an award-winning Mexican-Canadian author with at least seven books published. Until recently, I hadn’t read any of her works. A friend recommended Mexican Gothic to me, saying it was the kind of fiction I enjoyed, filled with esoteric details, so there’s something new and fascinating at almost every turn of the page. She was right. It’s an astonishing, colorful, lively book, filled with details about the Mexican culture, about art, history, and science that are interesting in themselves and worth following up, and that fit in the work some major thematic way. Though it’s a rather light horror, it also opens worlds of serious thought and conjecture. Everything weaving it together—the underpinning—is realistic, and, if the reader wants to pursue those prods, more than touches on contemporary issues such as gender roles, racism, and eugenics. It’s a strong egalitarian and cautionary (in a modern sense) work.
The plot is very traditional horror. Through a disturbing cryptic letter from a cousin, twenty-two years old Noemi Taboada is summoned for help. Catalina is being held prisoner at the home of her husband’s family, High Place, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. She mentions ghosts in the walls, voices. Noemi must answer the call. In the misty heights, she finds a hill-top mansion governed by a repulsive Howard Doyle, his daughter, son, grandson, and three servants. Silence reins, as does control. Noemi’s attempts to get medical help for Catalina are blocked. She is herself beset by nightmares—or sleepwalking dreams or visions—in which events clue her as the nature of the place, its origin, of herself, and what she risks. She discovers a symbiotic relationship that has been nurtured and advanced in the High Place locale, that has destroyed the family and more. She must draw on her better self and her instincts to avoid falling victim and to save others.
The beginning is inviting: 1950s Mexico City, parties, music, costumes, and customs. The horror begins slowly but increases, as the genre demands, and toward the end the book almost throbs and seeps. The horror is not so much frightening as repulsive. Moreno-Garcia is an expert about fungi, and her authority keeps the horror on the edge of reality. Howard Doyle has forced a symbiotic relationship with fungi. All the repulsive details—boils, blackened rot, blistered, peeling flesh, erupting flesh, foul, poisonous air, and so on, are natural—and not hideous—in the fungal world. That same decay in a human, especially close-up and over a short span of time is revolting. The adherence to what’s plausible in our natural world gains acceptance for the conjecture—this could happen to you/us. Francis Doyle, for example, describes the “cicada fungus Massospora cicadina” which takes over the cicada. Such zombie makers are pretty common in the natural world. (National Geographic author Mary Bates named five.) It’s fitting that misuse turns the user hideous. So the decay of Howard Doyle, given the network he’s joined, is realistic as is the milieu: mildew, mold, yellow and golden air—a gloom—fog, undergrowth, fevers and poison. The true horror comes from baser human nature: the lasciviousness of Howard Doyle, his greed, his violence. Murder, sacrifice, and live burial are human acts, quite distinct.
The monstrous Doyle family represents a very realistic and familiar threat—the belief that one race is superior. The Doyles’ isolation and desire to maintain their genetic traits above others led to incest, and to the use and destruction of the outsiders. The indigenous people of El Triunfo were seen as undesirable and gradually stripped of their land, its resources, their livelihood, their health, and their lives. Doyle is pure (incestuous) English; Noemi, mestizo, Spanish and Mezatec—European and indigenous. Their nature and ancestry present the eugenics argument and the broader battle is woven in by allusion to theories, major names, and studies in eugenics, e.g. the work of Galton, Davenport and Steggeda, Juan Vasconcelos, and others. Doyle notes that Noemi is swarthy, and he asks pointedly if she believes that it’s the destiny of Mexican people “to forge a new race that encompasses all races,” which he, of course, opposes with all his nature and power. His is an attitude that has sickened our nation and world.
While Noemi is a charming young heroine—beautiful, rebellious, savvy, and consistently witty (not the fainting sweetness of her cousin Catalina)—everything we learn about her reveals a human evolving, away from the standard and traditional, into the bold and individual. That means, here, away from romance and illusions, fairytales, into science and fact, away from the female role. She’s a new-money socialite, has attended Feminine University and now wants to attend National University. She knows about chemicals through her family’s businesses. Her goal of being an actress has given way to the goal of being an anthropologist like Margaret Mead. She is extremely well read and alludes to Kubla Khan, classical literature, British kings, Shakespeare, art, music, religion, herbal medicine, folklore, and parapsychology. Her references are not empty namedropping. She interprets her surroundings and herself with that extra knowledge. Noemi applies the story of Kubla Khan’s stone—which serves as a seal of protection for his messengers—to her own position serving as a messenger for Catalina, and having the stone in her pocket. This doesn’t seem like hubris at all, just drawing from the world for one’s identification, goals, and place—self-worth. She’s a woman absorbing knowledge and blending it in herself. Everything about her suggests progress. A woman underway. Though she doesn’t actually defy gender limitations, she blurs them. She’s drawn toward the grandson Francis, who has the traits that are traditionally female. He’s shy, an artist, poet, “fragile,” but also a naturalist—a combination of art and science—and she’s moved by his “fervor” more than his masculinity. This isn’t a reversal of roles but a blend of roles, without qualifying either as superior or inferior.
Moreno-Garcia suggests that it’s vital to consider the different as part of the whole, to work together for inclusive knowledge, and to explore and learn all aspects of a subject. She offers dualities and contrasts, such as the dye that can color wallpaper but also poison the air, the mushrooms that can bring visions and those that cause death, and the three medical practitioners on El Triunfo: the local physician who took over the practice of his predecessor; the English doctor who treats only the ruling family; and the herb woman, Marta Duval. The local guy doesn’t disdain or misread the herbalist. Sometimes there’s humor in a contrast, such as with Zote, which is great laundry soap and good catfish bait.
It was a pleasure and education to read and to reread Mexican Gothic, following the clues and prods in the story. I enjoyed Noemi’s fiery, lusty self, and strong will. Even more, I appreciated being guided to underlying issues. In light of current research into genetic engineering, creating clones for organ harvesting, and hybrid humans, Mexican Gothic is a warning, as fiction and science fiction in particular often are. I read just the other day, in Live Science, that “synthetic mouse embryos complete with beating hearts and brains” have been “created with no sperm, eggs, or womb.” MIT Technology Review reported a “startup that wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting.” Moreno-Garcia’s new book, The Daughter of Dr. Moreau was released last month, July 2022, and is already a best seller. I noted it’s historical fiction and feminist. No doubt. No doubt it will also be an entertaining, smart read.
Sources:
Books
Mexican Gothic
Del Rey, 2020
ebook
(321 pages print length)
Bates, Mary. “Meet 5 ‘zombie’ parasites that mind-control their hosts.” National Geographic, October 24 2018. https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/animals/2018/10/meet-5-zombie-parasites-that-mind-control-their-hosts. August 1, 2022.
Lanese, Nicoletta. Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/synthetic-mouse-embryos, August 4, 2022.
Regalado, Antonio. “This startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting.”
MIT Technology Review, August 4, 2022. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/04/1056633/startup-wants-copy-you-embryo-organ-harvesting/
We’re All in the Race: Ann Patchett’s Run
Any book that leads me to recognize my biases and expectations is valuable to me, and Ann Patchett’ s Run is one of those. A rare book, too, given the topics she deals with. She constructs a small mixed family whose members’ status and interactions raise questions on complex issues, particularly race, heritage, legacy, duty, honor, and love. She does so while engaging the reader in a family’s plight over an injured person and her child. It’s a book of many small mysteries and connections that create a very contemporary, important story, and could lead to a personal revelation as well. It’s a bold, beautifully crafted book.
Patchett prepares the reader for the work’s complexity by underlaying the present circumstances with a family legend. A statue of Bernadette, an early ancestor, has for four generations been passed to the female descendant who bears the closest resemblance—fair, redheaded, rather ethereal, in pose and expression like the virgin Mary. The legend contains the truth—a lie about who the statue represented and its origin. The dominant legacy, though, is that the similarity of surface features entitles one descendant to the statue and all it represents. The family now in possession of the statue includes no mother—she died years ago—no daughter, but three sons, one white and two black, both adopted. Who most closely represents the statue and thus will inherit it? The story that follows eradicates wonderfully the surface identity of characters and brings the reader into each character’s nature, never predictable by skin color. Actually, not predictable at all. And there lies the beauty and the power of this book. Some readers may be surprised at the difference between what they expect and what they find.
Though the beginning of present time is a bit slow, an unexpected event occurs that snaps the story into action and focuses sharply on family and divisions within it. While walking to a party to meet with Jesse Jackson, one of the brothers is saved from a wayward vehicle by a black woman who thrusts him out of danger and is herself injured. She is accompanied by a young girl. Why would she save him? Are they related? The ensuing hours will reveal who she is, why she and her daughter were nearby. And, increasingly important, how injured she is. Will she live? Priorities change as they must and should. The more long-term conflicts and estrangements become clear, too.
There’s so much inviting speculation that artifice seems heavier than story, but that’s only for a very brief while and possibly just my own take. Prominent politicians are mentioned, squarly placing the family on the Democratic side. The sons seem to represent religion, politics, and science. Names are clues. The young girl is Kenya and her mother is Tennessee. These and many more engaging hooks are not adequate to what the characters truly represent and how individual they become. They work wonderfully as little mysteries that, being followed, provide more important details. Who is the mother? Which child belongs to whom? Who was the father? Does it matter which child was adopted first? What was the original name? Are the characters who love Shubert related? Patchett can turn a view around, which encourages looking at the other side, and then questioning that, too. Sullivan quotes to Teddy part of a Martin Luther King’s speech but then remarks that “the white brother part doesn’t work exactly. It should be our black brothers. ‘We have sometimes given our black brothers the feeling that we like the way we were being treated.’” But Teddy, who is the artist at remembering speeches, thinks that if the next paragraph had been remembered his own “entire enterprise would have been sunk.” The passage has personal and positive meaning between the two men, and our immediate understanding is not the final one. Some of the signs are misleading, and our speculation about them is telling. This small community is our larger one, the view made palatable, not strongly emotional or even dramatic. Rather low and gentle.
Central is that the people love each other. They try to work together for one common goal. Sullivan and his father, Doyle, try to find one thing they can agree upon, because they are divided in many ways. They agree on Kenya, the young girl, on helping her. Of course. They agree on a person, not a cause. The cause is the unity and the unity is helping. How wonderful. The whole work suggests this. A similar suggestion is to be courteous and kind by pretending to feel if you can’t feel. That brings to mind the old adage (I forget the source, which may be Shakespeare, Aristotle, or some other wise person) to pretend a virtue if you have it not. In pretending, you may develop the virtue. Maybe you just need the opportunity. The pretense can always be dropped. One son does this, adopts a career as a duty, and relinquishes it when he feels the duty has been met. There’s no rule about such responsibility in Patchett’s work. It’s one of the possibilities for an individual. One of life’s vicissitudes.
Patchett expands the concept of mothering and disallows harsh judgment against women who give up their children. A woman can relinquish a child because of great love for the child or for another person. Most of the biological mothers here are missing, which of course matters to the child, as we learn through Tip’s later thoughts. But the absence in Patchett’s view is never abandonment, neither emotional nor physical. Love is the cause. And mothering is a genderless activity, a choice, an experience. It is nurturing and caring. As is fathering. Many characters here are mothering, including the twelve-year old Kenya, who wishes only briefly not to have the role. Perhaps the greatest is Sullivan. He is named after a priest and family member. He furthers the cause of protecting, evident as a dominant admirable trait of any person, male or female. Sullivan has the physical traits of his mother and, though his father thinks Sullivan doesn’t have any of his mother Bernadette’s traits, he definitely does. Sullivan loves children and knows how to love them, to comfort them. That’s his calling.
No character is left knowable only through surface details. In Patchett’s graceful, precise prose their thoughts and feeling reveal each more fully, different from outsider’s perception. This occurs with every character, but more strikingly, and possibly the most difficult for Patchett to achieve, with the two characters named Tennessee. The injured woman, Tennessee, hallucinates with (or truly talks with) her deceased friend. Thoughts and feelings are clearly separate, except when, briefly, they’re not. It’s an extreme example of the fluidity among characters and issues that makes the book profound and beautiful. While the shifting point of view in this passage answers questions that might otherwise go unanswered, it doesn’t seem an artifice as much as it does the realistic mental and emotional journey of the injured mother in remembering her friend. Only she could share this. The depth of individual emotion warms the passage and raises it above artifice.
Without giving away any details, let me say the ending is a positive and comforting view.
What rich and intricate messages this story contains. A mixture we are. Yes. And all of us heirs to a human nature and human rights, despite surface details. The original question, about who gets the statue, is answered. It’s a mild reward compared to all the answers Patchett has presented about the true nature of family, which includes all of us as individuals, flawed, but deeply concerned about life and desires and deeply loving someone, and paying some cost to serve others. All valuable.
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