(It’s the same deal with this review as with the KYoung review, down below. If you haven’t heard about Plascencia’s People yet, your life’s way way harder than it needs to be. Buy the hardcover from McSweeney’s, if you can find one, but either way: get a copy).
Salvador Plascencia’s debut novel, The People of Paper, is a metafictional slide through myth, history, love, and the act of writing itself. It’s a deceptive book, though. While it’s a heady read, set in a small town in California among tremendously colorful inhabitants, it’s truly, at its heart, an incredibly tender, almost unbearably sad story of love and forgiveness.
The plot specifics are hard to nail down, simply because there are so many. The story begins when Federico de la Fe’s wife leaves him and their daughter, Little Merced. Federico and his daughter leave Mexico for LA, settling in a town, El Monte, full of flower-picking immigrants. Federico, having taken a folk remedy to ease his sadness at his wife’s absence, feels “the weight of a distant force looking down on him” and, to escape, climbs into the abandoned, lead bodies of mechanical turtles.
In El Monte there’s a street gang, El Monte Flores, and Federico, along with members of EMF, declares war on this distant force, referred to in the story as Saturn. While all this is going on, a Baby Nostradamus makes an appearance, as does Rita Hayworth and a Mexican wrestler. Plus, there are various characters involved in curing sadness and remorse, and in assuaging their own shame at their sadness.
This summary barely encapsulates the first fifty pages.
The People of Paper moves in too many directions to give a coherent explication of plot, but, despite the multiplicity of voice and movement, it never feels chaotic or anarchic. Plascencia’s control is, at all times, masterful, and as the story progresses, the overwhelming control begins to appear in a new light, as something oppressive, desperate and searching.
All of this, though—the California town full of immigrants, their war with Saturn—is being told, the reader understands, by a larger, more removed voice. The multivalent voice is one of the hardest tricks to pull off in metafiction, and it’s shocking to realize how seamlessly Salvador Plascencia does it, the ease of the transitions he sets for the reader. Identifying Saturn here would rob the book of too many of it’s well-crafted surprises, but suffice it to say that there are masterful switches and reveals, pirouettes that leave the reader excited and amazed, basking in wonderful ah-hah moments.
What’s equally impressive is that the tricks that Plascencia uses—blacking out text, scribbling out a specific name, including drawings among the text, multi-columned text, text running in different directions on the same page—never feel cute or forced. There’s a generosity at the heart of the story, and never once does it feel compromised by its own brainy inventiveness. There are also, throughout any of the strands of the story, massive doses of humor, both of the laugh-out-loud variety and the quieter type, the sort of humor that elicits small, knowing nods.
Plascencia’s language sweeps and dives, sliding in references to popular culture (Val Kilmer is mentioned, for instance, though Rita Hayworth more often and more importantly) and then turning sharply to lines of stark, emotional beauty like “Without you there is nothing, not even drizzle.” Sadness is trump in the story, both as theme and as object of fixation, and as the novel moves from its first to second halves, the book becomes less a story about lost love, or missing the past, and morphs into a tale about trying to understand and use profound sadness in the service of something more than sorrow itself.
A few writers—Borges, Garcia Marquez— have been regularly name-dropped in reviews, and while Plascencia’s playful inventiveness is clearly grounded in magic realism, he’s done something as close to fundamentally new as it seems likely to be done in contemporary fiction. While focusing on the past, through created myth and memory, Plascencia has created a contemporary, vivid world of redemption and hope, both of which are grounded in the tough dirt of experience. It’s a gut-wrenching book, wise and sad and hopeful all at once.
