The Salvation of La Purisima

Photograph by : CR Files

 Reviewed by : Elaine Halleck, Guadalajara Reporter

by T.M. Spooner, Floricanto Press (Mountain View,
California, 2004) 184 pages.


Pensive gringo disenchanted with modern urban life comes to Mexico seeking something different and purer. Sound familiar?
Maybe it was because I could identify with the odyssey of T.M. Spooner’s protagonist in “The Salvation of La Purísima” that I took a liking to the novel. Maybe it was simply that I am very familiar with the stomping grounds of the character, anthropology student Paul Westin: Chicago, the cherry orchards of rural Michigan that are annually flooded with Mexican “migrant workers,” and west central Mexico.
Maybe it was because I know the difficulty in getting published that I came away from Spooner’s novel, his first, with an impression of the author’s sincerity. Here was a man with something he wanted to say. I would not be surprised if Spooner’s aim was to express an anthro-pologist’s fascination with understanding what is remote, rather than breaking new ground in English literature. After all, the dialogue is straightforward, not stuff that sophisticated fiction readers will find scintillating or stylish. In any case, much of the dialogue — if it actually took place — would have had to have been in Spanish, making the issue of whether it adheres to current stylistic preferences murky.
If Spooner was indeed focused on content and not style, his book would not be unlike the “anthropological studies” of Don Juan written by Carlos Castañeda, whose wildly popular books critics and scholars could never get a handle on. But Spooner’s and Castañeda’s books, though both describe spiritual journeys, are different from one another. Spooner’s fascination with rural Mexico is all about death and purity (thus, perhaps, the name of the village in the title), not about giving the reader a primer on shamanism.
And Spooner’s book leaves the reader with more questions than answers. The purity the traveler seeks is elusive. Is the village priest’s attempt to resolve a series of tragedies successful? It would seem not — his solution results in a murder, and it goes unpunished. Yet one comes away impressed with the priest’s methods, far superior to law enforcement’s approach, if there had been any law enforcement in La Purisima.
And did the traveler find the pearl of purity in the sister of his Mexican friend, whom he chastely kisses yet leaves in a gray area when he returns to Chicago?
Westin’s romantic struggles resurrect the sincerity angle and the idea of liking him and the book. Liking a protagonist is a criterion for putting a novel at the top of its class in some genres, such as romance, but not for reaching the pinnacle of Great Literature. Again, “The Salvation of La Purísima” won my heart more through its content than its style. After all, Westin manages to describe his disillusion with his ambitious, advertising-agency fiancee and remain a nice guy — a triumph of the heart considering this is a woman who gets bent out of shape because Westin goes to Mexico for a week to work on his doctoral dissertation and misses the fittings of the bridesmaids’ gowns. Could the “salvation of Purisima” have been about saving the narrator from marriage to this gem? In any case, you’ve got to hand it to a writer who can build a character who gives his Mexican love interest the earrings he just bought for his fiancee and make it all OK with a female reader.
“The Salvation of La Purisima” was published by Floricanto Press, which is dedicated to the promotion of Latino discourse and culture. Spooner, who lives in Illinois but says he has spent a lot of time in Mexico and was married at San Agustin church here in Guadalajara, has written a second novel that deals with love and sorrow on the shores of Lake Chapala, in which, he says, a metaphor is the decline of the lake. It will be interesting to see how his perspective plays out in a setting more Americanized than La Purisima.