Little Merced. Frederico de la Fe. Saturn. Baby Nostradamus. Merced de Papel. Cameroon. Smiley. Froggy. Mechanical Tortoise. I could go on, listing the seemingly endless stream of characters that crop up in Salvador Plascencia's debut novel, The People of Paper, but it wouldn't be worth it. In the end, they all sort of blend together. It's a short book, but it takes a long time to read, sifting through a fragmented story that jumps from Mexico to Southern California to Niagara Falls to New York to Europe, and that encompasses at least twice as many characters as those listed above. A man moves his daughter from Mexico to El Monte, a flower-growing town of immigrants in Southern California, where he wages war on an unseeable, unknowable foe, shielding himself and his gang in lead houses and mourning the loss of his wife. This war trundles the novel along and provides a tentative arc on which Plascencia hangs his many and varied digressions, which include tales of lovers (and ex-lovers), of Catholic mysticism, of creation and destruction. It's a veritable pastiche of a book, and so very earnest that it's hard to dismiss outright.
Plascencia's novel is not brilliant, but it tries to be. It's not much of a novel either, though it tries to be that as well. Instead, it's an undisciplined, post-modern ramble of a book, indebted to Marquez, Borges, and Pirandello, and more than a little derivative of all three. It contains moments of beauty, and also wells of authenticity, deep pores of sadness that you feel through the pages. Plascencia writes with intuitive abandonment, leaping through points of view like a gazelle, as if afraid to light on any for too long, for fear that the delicate shards of his prose will crumble under the weight of living, breathing characters. He employs a great many post-modern tropes - non-linearity, meta-narrative, typographic experimentation - as if tasting for just the right flavor, but he never really commits to any.
Plascencia's novel is not brilliant, but it tries to be. It's not much of a novel either, though it tries to be that as well. Instead, it's an undisciplined, post-modern ramble of a book, indebted to Marquez, Borges, and Pirandello, and more than a little derivative of all three. It contains moments of beauty, and also wells of authenticity, deep pores of sadness that you feel through the pages. Plascencia writes with intuitive abandonment, leaping through points of view like a gazelle, as if afraid to light on any for too long, for fear that the delicate shards of his prose will crumble under the weight of living, breathing characters. He employs a great many post-modern tropes - non-linearity, meta-narrative, typographic experimentation - as if tasting for just the right flavor, but he never really commits to any.
A wise (but not very nice) man told me once that good poetry should be "difficult, but not obscure." The same should be said of the post-modern novel; unfortunately, all too many of them rely on obscurity to assure their reputations as masterpieces. When you peel back the trope and gimmick and wordplay, as with The People of Paper, what is left is often the quivering soul of a novel - a soul that has the potential for brilliance, transcendence, and permanence but without the muscle to will itself into being. The ideas are all there; the talent and the artistry is there as well; yet diffused through so much fragmentation, they have little effect or resonance.
That's not to say that The People of Paper is a novel (purportedly) banged out in a flurry of inspiration like a Kerouac or a Faulkner (bullshit on both counts, by the way), even though it has that effect. Rather, it occasionally reads like the tediously crafted drafts one sees in writer's workshops - those revolutionary, experimental, deeply felt submissions that reek of hours spent finding the perfect sentence. While there's nothing wrong with writing either by inspiration or by elbow-grease, relying too heavily on either contains dangerous pit-falls, and somehow The People of Paper manages to evoke the negative side-effects of both extremes.
Listen, The People of Paper is not a bad novel, nor am I surprised by its publication or its accolades. This might be a case in which I am simply the wrong audience for such a novel and that, in failing to grasp or appreciate its scope, my criticism is invalid. After all, Plasencia has written a quintessentially post-modern novel - why, then, should it be subject to the rules of traditional criticism? Nevertheless, I left it baffled and more than a little unfulfilled: blinded momentarily by its emotional affect, occasionally captivated by its verbal prowess, but ultimately left with the sense that I've just experienced a monumental exercise and that the real novel, the true novel - the one that makes full use of Plascencia's undeniable talent - has yet to be written.
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