Gloria Mendez had the perfect job. She was ridiculously overpaid and deeply (though secretly) in love with her boss, the only other employee of the novelty company he called Caperco. Although she would happily have done the horizontal bop with Carl Perraira amidst the piles of fake doggy-doo and plastic vomit in their office, the man who was twenty years her senior had always kept his pretty Latina secretary at arm's length. Everything changed, however, when Carl failed to return from his annual vacation. The only clue as to his whereabouts was a static-filled phone call to Gloria, made from what she finally determined to be a tiny abandoned village in Mexico.
In search of her friend, not to mention he was the man for whom she had pined for a decade, Gloria headed south. Her visit was fruitless, however, for there she found herself ensnared in a swamp of incompetence, corruption, poverty, indolence, and stupidity. It wasn't until after her return to LA that she learned that Carl had been leading a strange and undecipherable double life, a life that one might call monastic; penitential, even. Just plain strange might be more apt, however. Five months later, when a handsome stranger appeared on her doorstep looking for new of his his long-lost papí Carlos Perreira, Gloria quickly hopped into her beat-up 1983 Dodge Dart¹ and, accompanied by her new friend, returned to the dusty village of Aguas Vivas.
As Gloria peeled back layer upon layer of lies and treachery from the stories she heard, she finally learned some of the truth - such as it was - about her friend and the story of his life. In the process, Gloria also learned a few things about herself... some of them not very nice things.
Much has been made of first-time author Jesse Kellerman's pedigree.Sunstroke, written by the son of mystery writers Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, has been hailed by a phalanx of reviews gushing that "talent breeds true" and "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." That, of course, presupposes that both parents are talented; a supposition with which I'm not completely comfortable. Be that as it may, however, we should judge Kellerman fils on his own merits and not on the popularity (which, I remind you, does not necessarily equate with talent) of his parents. How, then, should we judge young Jesse?
We should judge him on how well his attempt to follow in the family business succeeds. For my money, it does not succeed at all, the gushing praise from other reviewers notwithstanding. Sunstroke suffers from a muddled plot; a plot that actually never quite reaches a conclusion. That plot is at the same time too slow to be thrilling and too confusing to be interesting. Kellerman's writing proves pedestrian: choppy, with overblown attempts at airy literacy shoehorned into the text at awkward intervals. Take this example, as Gloria and friend brace a corrupt policeman in his home:
Slowly, the clouds changed, growing brighter as the rest of the sky darkened. For a minute and a half, the contrast intensified: pink cloud bruised heavens [sic], yellow cloud navy heavens, then - surreal and luminous - pure white on coal black.
And then it was over. The clouds darkened rapidly, reciting the same litany of colors as the sky of ninety seconds prior. Celestial buckshot pierced the black, cueing the cicadas...
"Celestial buckshot"? "Pink cloud bruised heavens"? In a word, "pretentious."
Given such faults, Sunstroke might merely be a undistinguished debut by an extremely well-connected author, the kind of person who could probably get his laundry list published. To classify it as such, however, requires overlooking young Kellerman's most important failing. That would be Sunstroke's repeated use of racial and cultural stereotypes in the depiction of Mexico and Mexicans:
"Construction is corrupt anywhere, but it's abominable in Mexico. Polaczek has a safe in his office, and in it he keeps a list of the people he's bribing. I surprised him because I wasn't out to swindle him. I must have seemed naïve. I stayed with him for years while coworkers left to start up their own crooked businesses, or become crooked police officers or crooked building inspectors..."
With almost no exceptions, every building in Mexico is squalid and dilapidated. All but a few of the inhabitants are filthy, lazy, dishonest, and corrupt; foul-mouthed and dipsomaniac. If they're too young to be drunks, they're merely squalid and squalling. Meanwhile, a nice octogenarian Jewish judge in LA is treated as "eccentric" when it's clear that the man is senile. One needs no roadmap to tell where young Kellerman's sentiments lie.
Because of this, what would have been an average debut novel - regardless of the fame of the author's parents - instead reads like a tract for a vigilante group "protecting" the USA's southern border from invasion. Were Kellerman's apparent anti-immigrant feelings expressed with logic and fact-based arguments, they would be more palatable. When expressed in demeaning descriptions and racial stereotypes, however, they are every bit as unacceptable as crosses burning on lawns, and taint this work beyond redemption.
¹ I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Dodge ceased production of the Dart in 1976.
The acclaimed debut by the son of bestselling novelists Faye and Jonathan Kellerman. When her boss of ten years disappears in Mexico, Gloria Mendez tr...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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