And here’s to you, Mr. Robinson…

Linton Robinson’s Sweet Spot: A novel about Mazatlan Carnival, Dirty Politics, and Baseball is praised to the skies by  James Tipton at Mexconnect.  Of the book, its protagonist (pro baseball player turned reporter and PR shill for the municipal government, Raymundo “Mundo” Carrasco),  and its author, Tipton writes:

Our hero lives in the real Mexico, and he loves it just the way it is, as well as its traditions: “I like old Mexican songs the same way I like coffee. Dark, creamy, overly sweet, served by pretty women, spiked with fine tequila.”

…

Like Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Mundo is an innocent. Trying to survive in a world that presses too much upon him, Mundo offers a dazzling wit that is endearing because the hero does not himself realize it is so dazzling, and he offers perspectives on a complex and perplexed society that, paradoxically, most clearly can be seen only by an innocent.

I’ve read a lot of novels in the first ten years of this new century, and I must say that Sweet Spot is one of the three or four I like the best.

The press release to promote the novel announces that Linton Robinson’s “work is very much affected by the decades he has lived in various parts of Mexico and Central America. “Sweet Spot” is a valentine to the eight years he lived on a hill right above the throbbing heart of Mazatlán’s carnival celebration, wrote for local newspapers, and hung out with the local musicians, athletes, and criminals.”

In a perfect world, the novel could have been a even better.  Sweet Spot is very much a Mazatlán  novel.   The normal “local color” paragraphs (spotlighting a few of the author’s favored restaurants and bars and tourist attractions) could go or stay and readers outside the city would never notice.  Locals  might find them interesting — I didn’t see them as essential.  But, I wasn’t the editor, and Robinson self-edits.  He does a good job of it, but an editor might have caught two plot weaknesses I found.

I found the Carnival sub-plot extraneous, more or less a “behind the scenes” look at at a colorful part of local culture,  not particularly important to the story.

Tipton ends his review “… it’s based on a true story”.  Well… sort of.   Chapter One is based on a “true story”.  Mazatlan did have a Worker’s Party presidente municipal — a commie version of Rush Limbaugh — who became a political embarrassment after beating his wife.  My problem with that bit of “truthiness” is that after going to the trouble of describing the wife a as a saintly popular figure, she disappears from the novel.  Since Sweet Spot is a murder mystery and the wife-beater is the victim, the wife should be around after Chapter One.   I’m of the Heinrich Ibsen school of writing –” if there’s a gun in Act I, it should be fired in Act III”.  If there’s a saintly aggrieved wife, she should at least be a plausible suspect in a murder mystery — or at least still exist — in some future chapter.

A more troubling problem, and one I don’t know how any editor would handle, or how it could be handled, has to do with the interplay between the reader and the protagonist.  Robinson was a reporter for Noroeste, and has written for U.S. and Mexican publications.  The fictional Mundo is also a Noroeste reporter, who has written for U.S. publications:  but Mundo is a Mexican with his crotchets and eccentricities.  And, like most aging jocks, he’s a horn-dog who gets himself into all kinds of complications with women.  A “real” fictional person.

Whether I agree with them or not, I can accept Mundo’s opinions on Mexican politics as a Mexican’s opinions.  What I have trouble with is that — being written for English  (presumably non-Mexican) readers  — Mundo sometimes slips into explication of Mexican attitudes, which makes   Lin Robinson, not Raymundo Carrisco, the narrative voice.

While there are English writers who pull off the trick of setting their mysteries in other locales (Robert Wilson’s Portuguese thrillers, Jenny White’s “Kemal Pasha” novels about Istanbul), Mexico is — for complicated reasons — the “distant neighbor” that we find impossible to understand and accept on its own terms.  The English-language Mexican-location mysteries  I’ve read up to now are either set among the expats (and usually the rich, clueless expats at that), or seemingly based on tourist brochures and a few visits to resort communities (like Mazatlán) and generally unbelievable to those of us who have a more than a superficial familiarity with Mexico.  Paco Ignacio Taibo II writes Mexican murder mysteries with Mexican characters.  Taibo is over the top in his plots, but his characters ring true to Mexicanists.  But Taibo has the advantage of being a Mexican.   Robinson doesn’t have that advantage, but comes closer than anyone else has ever done.

In quoting the Tipton review, I elided a paragraph:

Sweet Spot is incredible. Linton Robinson should be catapulted to the top of the pile of contemporary authors. Why didn’t this novel win the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize?

The reason is simple.    Sweet Spot was self-published as a “Print-on-Demand” book, which wouldn’t be considered by the major U.S. prize-givers in any event. I don’t say that to be snide.  I work for my publisher, but didn’t work for them until after my second book was  in the final production stages:  still, people assume I am “self-publishing”.  We don’t do Print On Demand books, but expect small publishers (especially in out of the way places)to be  ignored, and — good as some of our authors and books are —  don’t expect our books to garner any big prizes.

Of course, I can’t help but wish that Robinson (who lived in Mazatlán, and whose book is set in Mazatlán) had published with Editorial Mazatlán.  I like to think we would have made a very good book even better, but I don’t think its reception would have been all that different… except maybe locally.

I’m not particularly enamored of Mazatlán (it has serious drawbacks for me as a writer and researcher) and no real interest in being part of some expat colony, so tend to not pay much attention to these things, but Robinson was apparently well-known here as a prickly character.   There is some resentment and anger from  “locals” over the mere mention of the guy’s book.   One reason I’m writing about Sweet Spot here is I was asked to write a review, but irate “colonials” are demanding local websites  forbid discussion of this book.  Which is, it goes without saying, absurd.

Jack Kerouac, another difficult personality who wrote in Mazatlán, said “We are all assholes some of the time.”  Neither knowing — nor the least interested — in the relative assholishness of the various parties in the Robinson v. other gringos issues (and  comments regarding these  disputes will be deleted), I will say that those who claim great affection for this burg, and claim to speak knowledgeably about the place  but haven’t read the book are blowing smoke out of their anal orifice.

Oscar Wilde — yet another writer with a troublesome personality — said “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.”

Sweet Spot: A novel about Mazatlan Carnival, Dirty Politics, and Baseball is a well written book.  Warts and all.

Amazon.com,  or, of course, Mazatlan Book and Coffee Company.