THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 77
go without a fight,” we read in the last
pages) and we begin to understand what
Melchor is after. She isn’t holding a
Stendhalian mirror up to Mexican so-
ciety; she’s dissecting its body and its
psyche at the same time, unafraid of
what she might find.
V
iolence against women has shaped
Mexican life in recent decades, so
much so that a neologism popularized
in the seventies has become omnipres-
ent: feminicidio, or “femicide.” The term
describes murders in which the gen-
der of the victim is part of what mo-
tivates the perpetrator. This concern
takes center stage in “Paradais.” Like
its predecessor, “Paradais” is a portrait
of an ailing society inured to its own
cruelty, and employs long paragraphs
and supple sentences, always alive to
the rhythms of speech. But the new
novel departs from the previous one in
important ways: it is more contained,
less daring, less ambitious; it is, in a
peculiar way, more reader-friendly.
Unlike “Hurricane Season,” where
the moral misery of the characters is set
against a backdrop of material misery,
the new novel takes place in an afflu-
ent world: a gated community given the
English name Paradise (with an irony
that seems to be addressed only to the
reader) and referred to with the pho-
netic rendering “Paradais.” The milieu
is one of luxury and wealth, insulated
from what happens outside its perim-
eter; in a sense, the gates of Paradais are
built to keep out the world of “Hurri-
cane Season.” All borders are porous,
however, and this porousness, in the
shape of an unlikely friendship, will har-
row the supposed sanctuary.
The friends are teen-agers, both out-
casts of a kind, lonely and looking for
ways to palliate their solitude. Polo
Chaparro, a gardener at Paradais, comes
from Progreso (another name fraught
with irony), one of the downtrodden
neighborhoods that surround the gated
community. It’s a place dominated by
narcos so feared that they are referred
to throughout the novel only as they or
them, in italics. Franco Andrade, a.k.a.
fatboy, who lives with his wealthy grand-
parents, is overweight, addicted to porn,
and consumed by the prospect of hav-
ing sex with Señora Marián, the attrac-
tive housewife next door. The two boys
meet in the evenings to drink, with
Franco fantasizing volubly about Señora
Marián, talking about “nothing but
screwing her, making her his, whatever
the cost.” When “Paradais” opens, that
cost has been paid. In another exam-
ple of Melchor’s fondness for circular
structures, the catastrophe has already
taken place and we spend the rest of
the novel watching these two misfits
sluggishly resort to an act of extraordi-
nary violence. The question, of course,
is who or what pushes them in that di-
rection, and the novel in its entirety, a
slender hundred and twelve pages, is
the only satisfactory answer.
“Paradais” is a study of misogyny. But
Melchor is primarily a novelist, not a
journalist, and there are no concessions
here to any kind of reportorial com-
pleteness. We never get to know Señora
Marián as anything other than Franco’s
object of desire: we never have access to
her thoughts or emotions, or get more
than a perfunctory look at her private
world. The novel stays stubbornly within
the vantage of the two friends who plan
to attack her; its narrative choices mimic
their highly circumscribed empathy.
Since they don’t care who Señora Marián
is, in other words, the novel doesn’t care,
either. Melchor must have been aware
of the risks of this decision: if the novel
doesn’t care, why should the reader? Ford
Madox Ford once wrote that novels are
“the only source to which you can turn
in order to ascertain how your fellows
spend their entire lives.” We ascertain
almost nothing about Señora Marián.
By contrast, Polo’s entire life is laid
before us in convincing, even moving de-
tail. Tellingly, in a novel obsessed with
decisions and their consequences, Polo
is the only character endowed with a
past. We learn about his grandfather, an
important presence in his childhood, an
alcoholic who didn’t keep his promise of
teaching Polo how to build a boat be-
fore he died. In conveying Polo’s mem-
ories, Melchor’s writing alters slightly,
abandoning coarseness and profanity and
assuming an almost lyrical quality, as if
channelling Hemingway’s Nick Adams:
Whenever he crossed the bridge over the
river he would stop for a few minutes to watch
the brackish waters snake their way between
the lawns, the luxury villas on one side, and
on the other the tiny islands populated by wil-
lows and shaggy palm trees, barely visible
against the salmon pink canvas of the port, all
lit up in the night sky, there in the distance,
and he would get to thinking about the boat
that he and his grandfather should’ve built to-
gether when there was still time.... He could
earn his living fishing in his boat, or taking
tourists out on the lagoon, or just head upriver
with no destination, no plans or responsibili-
ties, row his way to one of the towns along the
river and its tributaries any time he needed
something, and leave again just as freely.
The lines are poignant, because Po-
lo’s dreams of freedom are utterly out
of his reach. That’s why he strikes up a
frivolous friendship with a rich kid he
despises—fatboy provides the bottles
of alcohol Polo needs to escape his gru-
elling reality—and why he doesn’t re-
sist fatboy’s insane plans of sexual vio-
lence. It’s as if the scheme offers an
illusion of escape, a linear plot that will
shatter his circular routine. Melchor
seems fascinated by the gratuitousness
of violence, by the absence of any sense
of responsibility. The issue shadows the
novel to the very last paragraph, where
Polo meditates on “the comforting cer-
tainty of his total innocence” before
echoing the novel’s opening line: “It
was all Franco Andrade’s fault.”
In 1955, when Faulkner visited Ma-
nila during an Asian tour, he gave an
interview in which he contended that
he never depicted degradation and vi-
olence for their own sake. “I have used
them as tools,” he explained, “with which
I was trying to show what man must
combat, and specific instances in which
he has been strangled by degradation
and violence, when he has hated the vi-
olence he participated in, when he has
resisted the violence.” Both “Hurricane
Season” and “Paradais,” however con-
toured by Faulkner’s techniques, make
that writer’s vision of humanity look
hopeful. In Melchor’s world, there’s no
resisting the violence, much less hating
it. All a novelist can do, she seems to
suggest, is take a long, unsparing look
at the hell that we’ve made.
