Randy’s latest for our Countdown to Hallowe’en is a recently published novel with a Gothic style.
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“You’ll be a good girl, won’t you?” Virgil said.
— from Noemí’s dream
In Mexican Gothic Noemí Taboada’s cousin, Catalina, has sent Noemí’s father a rambling, nearly incoherent letter from High Point, the home of her husband’s family, asking for help. Catalina has been married about a year to Virgil Doyle, a man Noemí’s father believed might have been a fortune hunter, and he wants Noemí to check on Catalina’s well-being.
Noemí goes to a local all-women’s college and has changed her major at least twice, studying acting and biology and more recently anthropology, meanwhile leading the life of a young socialite in Mexico City, quick with a quip, flirty, but it is implied in her father’s estimation an essentially unserious student. Still, she has an ambition not encouraged by her mother though not entirely discouraged by her father, something young Mexican women from good families in the 1950s did not do, pursue a master’s degree in anthropology. Noemí loves Catalina – they grew up together, Catalina a few years the elder – but is not anxious to trudge off to the remote, rural Hidalgo. To sweeten his request and on condition of taking responsibility to act as his emissary, her father offers his permission to go to the University.
High Point sits in the mountains, an old, decaying house, infested with mold, and almost immediately Noemí wonders if the mold is affecting Catalina. Features of High Point hint of a former splendor and past wealth; in short, the kind of house that supplanted Otranto’s castle, but also a house that represents the decadence of past European and English empires that tapped into South American resources – specifically, Mexican silver – for their wealth and power. There are secrets at High Point that the Doyle’s are in no hurry to share, secrets that have led to Catalina’s dilemma, and may also endanger Noemí.
This novel is definitely Gothic and since it is, you have to expect young women in peril. But there is more to this book than the title suggests. First, while Catalina fits the mold of the dreamy young heroine, Noemí is less traditional. She smokes, she drinks, she parties and flirts, and she chooses her suitors according to their ability to look good and amuse her. While this might put off a reader, underneath it is a playful sense of humor and intelligence; she’s not satisfied with settling for marriage and being a wife and nothing more, as exampled by her understanding of her father’s business. He has acquired his wealth and position through his paint business, and her knowledge of the chemistry behind paints informs her estimation of High Point and its inhabitants.
Mexican Gothic is also to some degree, a Gothic Romance. Noemí feels both attraction and repulsion for Virgil Doyle, who is in a position rather like Charlotte Bronte’s Mr. Rochester at the outset of Jane Eyre, though he develops into something different as the novel proceeds; meanwhile his cousin, Florence, could sub for Daphne Du Maurier’s housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, on her day off from Manderley (Rebecca). Florence’s son, Francis, is a seemingly ineffectual, pale, young man, harking back to the wan, Shelley-like Romantic hero; Noemí takes an interest in him in part because his shyness and earnestness amuse her, but mainly because he’s the only Doyle who seems to want to speak truthfully. And then there’s Howard Doyle, patriarch, aging and ill, besieged by growths, yet still a dominant personality, a man studied in eugenics who takes into consideration superior and inferior types. By his reckoning Noemí is the former, a healthy example of the hardy indigenous people.
There are also threads of fairy tales and Weird Tales woven into the novel. Early on there’s reference to Little Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast, and Moreno-Garcia’s narrative strands for Noemí and Catalina share features of those tales; later Noemí recalls Catalina reading her Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and again the novel shows parallels between the novel’s heroines and those of the fairy tales. The sense of fairy tale remains throughout the novel culminating during a chase through a crypt, but a fairy tale chase filtered through the eeriness of a Weird Tales story. Beyond that, a strong argument could be mounted for kinship to portal fantasy: Not exactly Alice visiting Wonderland – there is an Alice in the Doyle’s history and she does play a part in the novel – still, walking through the door of High Point takes Noemí from a world she’s known and thrived in despite its limitations on women to a more cloistered world. Or maybe it’s anti-portal fantasy, the doorway leading to something narrower and more constricting than the broad vistas of an Alice in Wonderland.
As with Alice, there are other evocative names in Mexican Gothic. High Point may stand for the Doyle’s self-assessment, but also sardonically contrasts with their current state. On GoodReads, Moreno-Garcia has remarked that Doyle comes from Arthur Conan Doyle and his pride in the English empire, and Howard from Howard Phillips Lovecraft (note, that High Point’s initials are H. P., I suspect purposely). Moreno-Garcia has edited an anthology of Lovecraftian stories by women, and here engages his work not only in her themes but by addressing his xenophobia and racism. Certainly, Howard Doyle’s plans evoke situations found in Lovecraft’s stories, though saying which would be a spoiler.
All of this merges as a coming-of-age story presenting Noemí with a challenge to her wit and ingenuity, one that threatens her autonomy, her conception of herself and her world, while oddly contrasting the dynamics of an Old World family with its assigned gender roles to a nouveau riche family open, if grudgingly, to their daughter’s ambition. Both an easy read and a complex one, Mexican Gothic is the best novel I’ve read in 2020, not just because of Noemí’s journey, or the Gothic and fairy tale overtones, but because Moreno-Garcia puts them to work as symbol of the consequences of European empire building. Through the Doyle family Moreno-Garcia particularizes and indicts the attitudes toward indigenous lives, lives expended acquiring wealth for Europeans, and attitudes that survived – survive? – well beyond the decadence and collapse of those empires. Somehow she does this while simultaneously offering her readership an entertaining Gothic novel, complete with moments of hallucinatory weirdness and dread, and two resourceful and engaging heroines.
While it begins slowly, as it progressed Mexican Gothic captured my attention and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
MEXICAN GOTHIC by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Published by Del Rey, June 2020
320 pages
ISBN: 978-1529402650
Review by Randy Money
