Testing the borders between the living and the dead
The Zigzag Way
By Anita Desai
Houghton Mifflin, 160 pp., $23
Over more than two decades, Anita Desai has produced a series of books notable for their intelligence, restraint, exotic settings, juxtaposition of unlikely characters, and elegant prose. Her latest novel, "The Zigzag Way," exhibits all these gifts in abundance, and the result is both simple and complicated. After two readings of this deceptively slender book, I am still piecing the story together, which is, I like to think, exactly what Desai would wish me to be doing.
Let me begin with the simpler part -- the plot. The novel is divided into four sections, which are linked by the main character, Eric, a young, white American. He lives in Cambridge with his girlfriend, the highly disciplined Em. Both are graduate students, and Eric, a historian, is struggling to turn his thesis on immigration into a book. When Em announces that she is going to Mexico to do research, he decides to accompany her; this decision in turn leads to the surprising revelation that his father was born in Mexico, though he left while still a baby.
From his first glimpse of Popocatepetl from the plane, Eric is enraptured by the exotic country. While Em works, he explores Mexico City, and one afternoon he wanders into a lecture about the Huichol Indians. Unfortunately for Eric, the lecturer, an elderly woman wearing "an extraordinarily extravagant costume," speaks primarily in Spanish, but suddenly he begins to recognize certain words.
"Eric was later to describe the experience, to Em, as like stumbling into a rabbit hole -- falling, falling, he said, till all was a welter of strange words, strange names. . . . Then, with a bump, landing upon the startling awareness that many of them were actually familiar to him." Doa Vera, he learns presently, has departed from her advertised subject to describe the way the mines have devastated the Indian lands. Eric recognizes the names from his one visit, as a small boy, to his grandparents in Cornwall when his grandfather Davey described the years he had spent working in the mines of Mexico. When Em heads off to the Yucatan to pursue her research into malaria, Eric travels into the Sierra Madre in a vague attempt to find some remnants of his own past.
But the novel does not follow only Eric. Desai has a remarkable gift for compression, and the second section explores the life of Doa Vera, the lecturer, who managed to leave Germany during the Second World War by marrying into a Mexican mining family, and who subsequently reinvented herself as an expert on the Huichol Indians. The exquisite third section -- my favorite -- is devoted to Eric's grandmother Betty, who in 1910 made the long voyage from Cornwall to Mexico to marry Davey. Full of ardor and curiosity, Betty sets up house in the small mining town where Davey and the other Cornish miners work, only to find her life painfully circumscribed. She is unable to leave the house on Sundays because of the drunken brawls, and Davey does not like her going to the local market, even with their maid, Lupe. When she buys cheap earthenware from the local potter, both Davey and Lupe disapprove.
It is surely no accident that both Vera and Davey come to Mexico out of necessity, unlike Eric, who is a leisurely tourist. The complexities of forced immigration and the exploitation of workers, migrant and otherwise, are certainly part of Desai's larger theme, but so is something deeper, darker, and more ancient. The novel opens with Eric arriving at an inn near the mining town where his grandparents lived. Waiting in the candlelit hall, he looks up to see "a skull with green sequins for eyes and a circlet of gilt marigolds for a crown. Above this, on the wall, whole skeletons danced and cavorted, rustling in the draft from the door, for they were cut out of paper." Throughout these pages both the characters and the reader confront images of death and of the relationship -- mysterious, tenacious, elusive -- between the living and the dead. The brief final section of the novel shows Eric joining in the celebration of La Noche de los Muertos at the graveyard where his grandmother is buried.
But the title of the novel, and indeed Eric's own youthful nature, suggest another major theme. When Em refuses to let him accompany her to the Yucatan, Eric "looked at her and smiled. . . . How foolish to think he could join the company of the sure and the certain, those who knew what to do with themselves from morning to night every day of the year and everywhere." For Eric the major questions are to do with life and the conduct thereof, not death. And later at Doa Vera's hacienda, when he reads an account of how the Indian porters in the mines used to ascend in a zigzag fashion, he recognizes his own privileged journey.
The narrative strategy of the novel also mirrors these zigzags as Desai deftly loops back into the past. This virtuosity, however, does come at a certain cost. Doa Vera and Betty are so fully realized that Eric suffers slightly in comparison. Especially reading about Betty's brief life, I felt that I too had fallen down a rabbit hole into another world: sensual, vivid, frightening, and almost unbearably suspenseful. My only regret was that this part of the book was so short and I was soon back in the company of her rather pallid grandson.
Here in America, All Hallow's Eve is mostly about trick or treating, with the emphasis on the latter. The remarkable ending of "The Zigzag Way" reminds us of the true purpose of this holiday. It also suggests an unpalatable truth that the orderly world of fiction often conceals: namely that some people, by virtue of family or geography or history or disposition, are simply luckier, and, if you're reading these words, there's a good chance that you're a member of this group. Be glad that you have the luxury to make your own zigzag way.
Margot Livesey's new novel, "Banishing Verona," was published last month. She is a writer in residence at Emerson College.
