The Zig-Zag Way

It is also the story of Eric, an American graduate student from Boston who loses interest in his exercise of turning his thesis on immigration patterns in 19th century Boston into a book on immigration in general. Losing the details in generalities bore him. Following his girlfriend Em to Mexico City, his travel ends in a ghost town that was formerly a mining town on the Day of the Dead. This final section is a departure from Desai's usual writing, which usually stays grounded in realism, not magic.

The novel's title, which describes the way Indian miners used to climb the tunnel to confront the air currents that entered the pits from outside and made respiration harder, also describes the way Eric's own path leads him in his discovery of his ancestry and ancestors.

Women play strong characters in the novel, as they seem to do in many of Desai's work. Emily comes across rather cold and she seems to have been intentionally drawn pale, white, blond, a WASP from Philadelphia, as a counterpoint to Eric and his family, Maine coast fisher folk. Eric too seems rather like a ghost, wondering and wandering, pondering the question of why he and his father are drawn to strong women. I am not sure if he finds his answer but he asks some interesting questions.

Of the two women characters, Dona Vera and Betty, Vera is by far the more colorful. Unfortunately we meet her first when she is drawn with a heavy hand, a stock figure. Reminds one of a Disney-like character, like Cruella. A plot devise to revive Eric's memory of his childhood when he hears her lecture, she is also the vehicle to provide a narrative of the Huichol Indians and pre-Columbian Mexico. No matter, she is a splendid device. As the plot develops we see several facets to her life and personality develop. Several threads of narratives, the Christian conversion and the survival of the Indian gods and goddesses that the conversions have not managed to erase, the anti-Semitism and the twists it took in pre-war Europe in Vienna, and Vera's very personal torments all weave in, making her quite a complex and layered character. She also has a secret that she keeps from the scholars who come to her hacienda for their research on the Huichol.

They did not guess . . . that she had no education beyond elementary school, that she had not been to a university or acquired a degree (other than the honorary ones that had been conferred on her lately) and feared to write so much as a monograph lest it give her away. Besides, which language could she have written in? Neither English nor Spanish, both spoken languages to her, not literary ones. The only one she could write with any ease was one she would never use: she had crushed it out of herself. No tracks, no tracks.

Betty is another vehicle, this time to portray the lives of the Cornish women who arrived here as the wives of the miners in the early 19th century. Desai has skillfully brought her to life in these pages with the way she loads her narrative with particular details carefully chosen to reveal character, history, and action as the Mexican revolution stirred by Pancho Villa and Zapatta gets underway. It is to her graveside that Eric comes to discover the meaning of his own journey.

It is a thoughtful book and a window into a slice of Mexican history and the Cornish immigration and their history of silver mining, all of it told in Desai's style with economy and grace. It makes you want to pack your bags and take a trip to Mexico City. Just make sure it coincides with the Le Noche de los Muertos.