Unstuck in Tijuana: A Hazel Motes Story
Three of my favorite novels of all time. I couldn't think of what to call this, so the title is a nonsensical reference to all three books. Really, two books and one of the authors.
Like most children, I learned how to read at a young age. After that, I began devouring any book I could find. Novels, specifically. I read books that were appropriate for my age, but eventually I started dipping into my parents’ collection because I was a weird kid. My dad had a collection of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books that he let me read but after burning through those, I started reading his Louis L’Amour books. That was my gateway into John Grisham and by “gateway”, I mean they happened to be on the same bookshelf. He also had Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler, so I really got the full Dad Fiction experience.
I dropped off for a while when I moved back to the states at eighteen and picked it up again when I started hanging out at the library sometime in my mid-twenties. To be clear, I was hanging out looking at movies, not just loitering. I did have stare-downs with a few homeschoolers but that’s just how we greet each other in the wild.
Since then, my reading has fluctuated but remained a pretty consistent part of my life. I’m not a big re-reader, but the three books I picked below are ones that stuck with me so much I’ve gone back to them more than once.
Into the Beautiful North (Luis Alberto Urrea)
This one’s about a young woman from the fictional Mexican town of Tres Camarones who takes a group of her friends up north to find help when bandidos take over the town. She gets the idea from watching The Magnificent Seven at the town theater, the Cine Pedro Infante, and gathers a group of her friends to cross the border and find their own Magnificent Seven. A white missionary kid is involved at some point.
Before this one, Urrea, who is from Tijuana where a good chunk of this novel is set, wrote a nonfiction book called The Devil’s Highway, a harrowing account of twenty-six men who tried to cross the Mexico-US border into Arizona. Beautiful North is a considerably lighter romp, while not ignoring the realities Mexican people face on either side. This book also came out in 2009 and while I’m not suggesting border relations were great then, it does feel like a different world reading something set during the Obama administration. The music of Kanye West also figures into the story at one point1. But the main characters are so well-drawn and clearly loved by Urrea that I forgive the 2009 of it all.
The moment that made me immediately fall in love happens early on at the movie house where someone confidently declares that you can’t even tell Yul Brynner is Mexican. It took me right back to one of my friends spending a considerable amount of time trying to convince me that Alfred Molina—a British man of Italian and Spanish descent—was Latino.
Mother Night (Kurt Vonnegut)
Making a “Mount Rushmore” of anything is stupid because A) taste is subjective and acting like yours deserves to be carved on a———mountain is the impulse of an insufferable being and B) how big is this Mount Rushmore allowed to be and can you swap heads on it because life experiences can really change how you perceive a certain author’s—-if I had to make a Mount Rushmore of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut is definitely up there. The first time I ever picked up one of his books was during those many times I hung out at the library and decided to pick up Slaughterhouse-Five on a whim. I ended up blowing through half of it in one sitting and after I finished that one, I came back and started checking out every Vonnegut book I could find.
Mother Night is about Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American who moved to Germany as a boy and grows up to become a playwright and Nazi propagandist. The novel is framed as Campbell writing his memoir as he awaits trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison. We learn that he was a politically apathetic man who worked for Joseph Goebbels and at one point, right at the start of World War II, was approached by the U.S. War Department about becoming a double agent. As the world falls apart around him, he moves comfortably through it until he has nowhere else to hide from the consequences of his actions.
“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know,” Vonnegut writes in the Mother Night introduction. “I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
I could spend paragraphs trying to get at what it is that makes this book so potent, but that says it better than I could. Possibly because Kurt Vonnegut was very good at writing.
Wise Blood (Flannery O’Connor)
Speaking of good at writing, Flannery O’Connor is absolutely on my Mount Rushmore. A devout Catholic woman who wrote challenging and disturbing stories, I’ve been hooked since I read “Everything That Rises Must Converge” for an English class2. That tension in finding sacred in the profane is what keeps me coming back to her work. She only published two novels in her tragically short lifetime—Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away—but they both really left a mark me, especially Wise Blood.
Hazel Motes is the central character, recently discharged from service in World War II3 returning home to Tennessee. There’s a lot wrong going on with Motes, but it all coalesces into him becoming an atheistic evangelist preaching the good word of the “the church of the truth without Jesus Christ Crucified.” It doesn’t smoothly, as one might imagine. Someone runs through town dressed as a gorilla and eventually someone breaks out the barbed wire for some more shenanigans4. I think it’s a fascinating exploration of belief, dogma, free will, all things that concern the Christian faith told through the perspective of a deeply irreligious person.
John Huston directed a film version of Wise Blood in 1980 with Brad Dourif playing Hazel Motes, an example of impeccable casting. There’s also an Ethan Hawke-directed O’Connor biopic, Wildcat, with Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor coming soon. Going off the trailer, it looks like it’ll be dealing with the sacred-profane tension which makes me feel like we’re in good hands with this one.
That’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll have another check-in here in about a week or so. Thank you for reading.
Not gonna lie, this one really stings.
That I barely passed due to multiple absences. I don’t think my teacher believed I knew how to read.
This is the second time WWII has come up in this post, which I’m guessing is a side effect of fatherhood.
“Shenanigans” is a hilariously inappropriate way to describe what happens later in the book. Where are my First Reformed heads at?