Refried Beans.(Review)

The Years with Laura Diaz, by Carlos Fuentes (Farrar, Straus, 516 pp., $26)

Carlos Fuentes has benefited from a kind of literary affirmative action: He is Mexico's best-known novelist and therefore considered its most talented and accomplished, with an oeuvre that is important because it is . . . important. However, any talent he previously showed has slipped badly, and he is now in decline.

In The Years with Laura Diaz, Fuentes has produced a politically correct female equivalent to his most famous work, The Death of Artemio Cruz, published in the U.S. in 1964. Artemio Cruz was a brilliantly nuanced chronicle of modern Mexico through the life of a single character, a veteran of the Revolution who becomes corrupted by the success of the revolutionary elite. But despite the author's leftist sympathies, Artemio Cruz was by no means ideologically simplistic, since Fuentes's goal was to examine Mexican reality critically. He now seeks merely to burnish the self-image of the Mexican cultural elite.

Ostensibly, The Years with Laura Diaz presents a look at Mexican history from 1905 to 1972 through the life of a female lumpen intellectual-an associate of the Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo who eventually emerges as a successful photographer in her own right. It soon becomes clear, however, that Fuentes is much less concerned with an exploration of Mexican life than with a reaffirmation of leftist cliches. The book opens in Detroit in 1999, where the heroine's great-grandson has gone to film a television documentary on one of Rivera's murals. Wandering in the ghetto and photographing its denizens, "insolently, idly, provocatively," he is predictably mugged. As if such a violent public attack on a foreigner were more common in Detroit than in Mexico City.

The narrative follows the eponymous heroine from her childhood in a well-off Mexican family through her adolescence in a landscape familiar to readers of "magical-realist" works such as those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. When she reaches adulthood, some real figures from Mexican cultural history appear, and when she gravitates to the circle of Rivera and Kahlo, she begins her artistic career. But after she marries Juan Francisco Lopez, a trade-union leader, the book becomes an increasingly talky affair. Successive historical dramas-the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, the exodus of North American Communists to Mexico, the shooting of radical students in 1968-serve mainly as pretexts for wooden conversations, strung together to approximate a lifetime. The timeline is alleviated by uninspired meditations on the decline of Laura's passion for her husband and the depressing quality of her affairs with other men, and by family vignettes of little vigor: The generations die, and Laura mourns somewhat halfheartedly.

Much is missing from this book-indeed, everything that would have made it an authentic chronicle of Mexican reality. Unlike Artemio Cruz, which successfully accounted for the range of human experiences in the revolutionary epoch from the bottom to the top of society, this is essentially a party-line history of Mexico as seen only from the capital and in the minds of its leftist elite. In this legendary place, Mexican intellectuals are heroes of cultural resistance against North American vulgarity and stupidity, and protectors of the diminishing revolutionary tradition.

Laura's biography includes more than a few borrowings from those of Fuentes and Kahlo, a feminist icon worldwide. But as in his other recent books, Fuentes has not done his homework. Like his novel The Old Gringo, based on the life of Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in 1914, Laura Diaz is replete with anachronisms, gaffes, and legendry. When this book came out in Spanish, the Mexican critic Jose Emilio Pacheco noted that "although Fuentes has read everything and naturally knows the correct dates," people are said to read various books and dance to popular tunes years before they are composed. Other instances involve revisionism ...