AMÉRICA DEL NORTE, by Nicolás Medina Mora
The grandiose title of Nicolás Medina Mora’s first novel, “América del Norte” (“North America”), gives a good sense of its ironic tone and its unabashed desire to include everything on the continent, past and present: Hernán Cortés, Montezuma, NAFTA, the war on drugs, Trump, AMLO, José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, the murdered students of Ayotzinapa — even the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The book takes the form of a collage of short essays about these and other subjects, intercut with the story of its young protagonist, Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar, who is obsessed with history and his place in it.
Sebastián, like Medina Mora, is from the upper stratum of the Mexican elite, the son of a former Supreme Court judge who was also attorney general under Felipe Calderón, one of Mexico’s least beloved presidents. Character and author also share degrees from Yale and Iowa, and both spent time as journalists in New York.
As a narrator, Sebastián seems to think that his ambivalence toward privilege is what his story should mostly be about. “By the time my father became attorney general, he had 20 bodyguards,” he says. “When we went out as a family, we were surrounded by two dozen men, 10 assault rifles and several live grenades.”
Demographics and parentage, of course, should not determine our entire view of a person’s sensibility. But I did wonder how it felt to have that kind of protection and to live in that rarefied a world. Sebastián never really explores this, nor does he much delve into his father’s role in the war on drugs, even though his family legacy — he is a descendant of the conquistadors — preoccupies him.
