AMÉRICA DEL NORTE

A piercing critique of the shallowness of academia and the soufflélike weightlessness of American culture.

As romans à clef go, this doesn’t get much more clef-y. A young Mexican journalist (like Medina Mora), Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar, gets a scholarship to Iowa (like Medina Mora), and, on graduating, spurns residence in the U.S. to return to Mexico City (like Medina Mora). On that scaffolding the author builds a steely-eyed but not unsympathetic portrait of the people he meets. “In Mexico, not even the oligarchs are happy,” notes Sebas, as his American friends dub him. He comes from a well-to-do household, its head a Supreme Court judge, in a country so riven by inequality that he’s moved to ask his police bodyguard, “Why haven’t the poor killed the rich already?” He arrives in the promised land of El Norte brilliantly well versed in literature, philosophy, history, art, to find most of his would-be compatriots profoundly ignorant. The Swiftian cast of characters includes the “Austro-Hungarians” of Sebastián’s privileged class and family and, in Iowa, writer wannabes dubbed “the Decanonizer,” “the Pseudo-Anthropologist,” and “the Delightful Kid from Michigan.” What he learns from those north-of-the-liners, including a girlfriend who’s a groupie of all things Latine, is that, as Habsburgian as he might be, he’s still just another brown person to them. More, after years in the U.S., “I loved America more than myself, but America didn’t love me back,” which causes him to head home, now disabused. Among many highlights: a splendid evisceration of “a Proud Boy-in-training” writing student and a superb closing paragraph that quietly evokes The Great Gatsby while being utterly original.

A debut from an author to keep on your radar, assured, darkly funny, and impeccably written.