PERPETUAL WEST

A sheltered young couple from Virginia move to El Paso to explore Mexico’s culture and get in over their heads.

Alex Walker was a promising history student when he married his professor’s daughter, Elana Orenstein. He enrolls in a graduate program in El Paso, Texas, driven to understand his birth and abandonment in Juárez, Chihuahua, before he was adopted by a White missionary family to be raised in West Virginia. Elana goes along and enrolls in an undergraduate program in El Paso because going along is what she does—she’s bright but unfocused. After they’ve been in Texas for a few months, drifting apart emotionally, Elana flies home to see her family, and Alex heads into Mexico with his new lover, the beautiful Mateo, a professional wrestler. Their passionate trip turns into a nightmare when the gangsters who run the wrestling operation come after Mateo. Elana comes home to discover Alex missing without a trace; she has no inkling of his relationship with Mateo. Already struggling with anorexia and worried about her younger brother’s addiction problems, she spins into a desperate search for her husband, with sections of the book about her efforts alternating with what’s happening to Alex and Mateo. There is some lovely prose in the novel despite its tone, which goes from bleak to bleaker. But aside from some spurts of suspense, its pace is slow, and although its characters sometimes interrogate U.S. stereotypes about Mexico, the book itself falls into them.

The story of two American intellectuals in Mexico swerves into thriller territory but bogs down.