THE CLEANSING

A complex triangular relationship is painstakingly probed in Rabasa’s thoughtful second novel (after Floating Kingdom, 1997).

When oncologist Paul Leander analyzes a liver biopsy that indicates his long-estranged acquaintance Victor Aruna has terminal cancer, the past reaches out to reclaim Leander and his wife Adele, a busy ad-agency art director. Twenty years earlier, in Mexico City, where Paul was earning his medical degree and Adele was establishing credentials as a freelance photographer, a casual friendship with indolent playboy Aruna had introduced both Americans to the glamour of drug-fueled nonstop partying—and to each other. A jail term for Paul, a near-rape endured by Adele and the series of manipulations and betrayals performed almost casually by the amoral Victor ended that friendship. But as Rabasa’s generally smooth juxtapositions of extended flashbacks with present action reveal, Victor still has a claim on the Leanders’ hearts and minds. Inviting himself to their home—ostensibly as a temporary guest acclimating himself to his death sentence, but really, in Paul’s view, to die there—he opens numerous old wounds, triggering Paul’s emotional recollections of a wild party at the palatial home of a “top drug lord,” his detention on false charges (and the influential Victor’s inexplicable indifference to Paul’s fate) and the realization that mocks Paul’s chosen life of compassionate service to others: “He would always be guilty of the surprising cruelty he had discovered in himself.” The book, with its nicely ironic title, is quite well written, and its three principals emerge as complicated and seductive characters. But the emphasis on those long-ago days in Mexico grow increasingly labored, and the reader’s interest in the story’s mysteries gradually dissipates.

An honorable effort, nonetheless. Rabasa seems well on his way to producing a really first-rate novel.