A review by just_one_more_paige
The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela

challenging funny informative reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

 
I was already on the library waitlist for this one when the 2023 Aspen Words Longlist was announced and this one was on it! Love when that happens. As I said in my review for How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, I am not sure if I’m doing to full longlist reading challenge this year yet, but I am at least tracking the ones I do read, so here is my second longlist review for this year. 

In an unnamed “anytown” or “everytown” suburbia, Andrés has returned home from the city to help his aging parents after his father has a surgery. With no reason not to, he ends up attending his twenty-year high school reunion while there. And in doing so, is brought right back into the same relationships and patterns with people he hasn’t seen in, well, twenty years, including his first love. Trying to find, or redefine, the space he takes up, as a gay Latino professor from a big city coming back to the place where, as a youth, he tried to hide or downplay everything that made him…himself, from his sexuality to his race to his interests and opinions. 

This book is absolutely fascinating to me, in the way it takes an, essentially, cliched concept (coming back home once you’ve left and gone on to “bigger and better” things), mixes it with a totally mundane premise (a high school reunion and catching up with old friends) and makes it something fresh and brilliant and incredibly captivating. It shouldn’t have been this good. But it was! A major part of that comes down to the writing itself. It is truly exquisite. I read so many passages more than once, not a thing I normally do, just to appreciate the deftness of the language. The language is exacting, in the precision of the sentences and word choices and the calling out of so many contradictory and arbitrary and ridiculous small/quotidian details and realities of inequality in the US. Everything from the littlest details of life, like the interactions of siblings and the hierarchies of school life, to the major framework things, like the strain the social systems in this nation put on certain populations, are so cleverly and perfectly and *concisely* detailed. The contradictions of suburban American life are portrayed with a cutting and darkly humorous pen. It’s just phenomenal. And what a weirdly, but perfectly, random poignant final lines. 

Past that, thematically, I was equally impressed with what Varela covers in this novel. Taking on topics from physical health and nutrition, immigration and assimilation, sexuality, mental health, race, and access to education and other social resources, in ways that are fully examined, but still very accessible. He is able to recognize, and call out, the complex and overlapping causes of so many societal standards/capitalistic/health-based realities as basic but unentangle-able truths, in a way that is both angering and darkly humorous. It’s surprisingly approachable, conceptually, even within the high-brow literary writing. He also examines why there is a trope of leaving suburbia for the big city (though those have their own problems, of course), to interesting effect. And his look at the many being “between worlds” that people (in this case, our MC, Andrés) face – neither immigrant nor American, not white but lighter skinned, neither rich nor destitute – and how those myriad neither/nor realities combine to make Andy both part of some oppressions on one side and marginalized in other situations, is such an important, nuanced examination of the roles we all have in this country.  

 
On a very personal note, the way studying public health insinuates itself into everything Andrés does and says – every conversation and thought and interaction – is viscerally relatable. Once you study and know it, it’s impossible to separate the knowledge from anything, or see anything not through that lens. And that definitely leads to an internal tornado of “is it ok in this case/is this an exception” or “should I speak up/is this crossing a line” that you can get caught up in over and over again. And in the end, you maybe never know what the “right” answer is because no situations are that easy/straightforward, so you end up stepping on toes or being unnecessarily confrontational or letting someone down, no matter what your (anxiety-inducing) best intentions are. Ooooof.  
 
Part of the magic in these pages, I think, is Varela’s choice to leave the town Andrés is from unnamed. It gives the reader the chance to make his observations and insights both intimate and universal, in a very unique way. Overall, if “wry” came to life in a major way, this book would be it. It’s funny in the “observations of terrible and hard truths that we all know about but can only laugh to get through it” kind of way. Just a truly special reading experience.   
 
“I often get worked up about these things and later realize that I haven't left sufficient room for the fullness of humanity or for the consequences of history. It’s my way.” (Well, I identify with that.) 
 
“…this was a country that practiced a religion of lofty expectations and unattainable goals.” 
 
“I know he’s right, but somehow I can't assimilate into my own experience what I know to be a universal truth.” (Phew, again, so relatable.) 
 
“Succeed while hiding in plain sight. Be better in order to be equal.” (What a succinct phrasing of this concept that insinuates itself into every aspect of non-white existence.) 
 
“As far as I can tell, the suburbs are where people go to preserve their ignorance, in service of a delusion they've mistaken for a dream.” 
 
“Instead of deflecting the world's hatred, it'd pierced her, until she'd withstood all that she could, until it began to come out of her and pierced the very ones she'd sought to protect.” 
 
“I worry about how aging makes humans more conservative. I think it has something to do with fear. Fear for one's own safety, fear of damage to one's property, fear of new and unknown things. Adult-onset conservatism is also just exhaustion. A lifetime of being optimistic about life's unsolved problems fosters disappointment and, eventually, pessimism. But no one wants to believe they're pessimistic, so they switch perspectives and move the goalposts. The injustices that could have been remedied with more resources or more empathy transform into intractable dilemmas that we can then argue must be addressed with austerity and hard knocks, when the truth is that we never pumped in enough resources or empathy to have truly solved anything. Boom: conservative. Or maybe it isn't a consequence of fears, but a fear in and of itself. The very fear of examining the past and our complicity in that past.” 
 
“We are, after all, a society that mistreats people to the point of damage so that we can then use the damage as a pretext for more mistreatment.” 
 
“And how long would he need to be this happy and free before he could actually be a happy and free person? The person he would have been if the world were as it should be.” 
 
“But if the past festers still, isn’t that the present?” 
 
“Periodically she'd reminded herself that a life spent proving people wrong wasn't a life at all.” 
 
“The American immigrant experience has been a mash-up of The Godfather and Toy Story set in a factory full of crisscrossing conveyor belts, where the only possible endpoints are a gilded throne or an incinerator.” 
 
“Being outnumbered, it seems, takes a physical and psychological toll.” 
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