The Carlos Chadwick Mystery: A Novel of College Life and Political Terror

Rating:
Summary: A first-rate political novel that speaks to today
Review: First and foremost, this is a political novel. Of course, there is a sense in which any novel is a political novel, in that it reflects to some degree the social and political situation in which it was produced. But THE CARLOS CHADWICK MYSTERY is political in the sense that it seeks to examine predominant American political attitudes in a fictional context. Subtract the political elements from this novel, and you are left with no novel at all. Although a common genre in Europe and Latin America, it is comparatively rare in the United States and Britain, much to the impoverishment of our literature.

The novel tells the story of how Charlie Chadwick, born, raised, and educated in Venezuela by an American father and Venezuelan mother, attends his father's alma mater, the exclusive, elitist Richards College, and is transformed from a lightly political individual to a passionate leftist and possible terrorist who insists on being called Carlos. The text consists of three main sections: an account of his life by a very slightly to the left mainstream print journalist, a self-absorbed memoir by Carlos's bright but not-very-profound ex-girlfriend, and a highly political play written by Carlos. The narrative is situated roughly in the very late 1960s early 1970s, but in a somewhat alternative universe than the one that we remember. For instance, the primary American military intervention is in Peru, and the student protest in the book revolves around this rather than Vietnam. This has the effect of forcing us to reconsider the issues in a slightly different context, an alternative history more effectively exposing the inner logic of actual history. Anyone objecting that the U.S. would never invade or bomb Peru needs to look a bit more deeply at the depth of prior American involvement in Latin America and should recall that in the 1980s we actually did invade Latin American countries on more than one occasion.

The novel contains a wealth of provocative and interesting ideas, and anyone willing to take the book on its own terms will undoubtedly find it a fascinating read. One seeking a mere narrative might look elsewhere. The ideas in the first two sections of the novel are more subdued than in the final section, and consist primarily in the political naiveté of the journalist and the former girlfriend. In fact, although the novel is subtitled "A Novel of College Life and Political Terror," I could not keep from thinking that the real issue was not terror but naiveté. For instance, both fail to perceive the deeply entrenched ideology permeating liberal capitalist society ("liberal" I mean in the broad nonpartisan sense of the broad consensus that informs all of American life; by this standard Ronald Reagan is a paradigmatic liberal). The girlfriend writes, "I believe strongly in America's system of pragmatic, nonideological problem solving," a sentence that that embraces more than one naiveté. It is in the final section of the book, "Perspective Industries, LTD.," that the political issues are raised most sharply. In reading this section, I kept being reminded of Guy Debord and his SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE. I do not know that there is a direct connection, but many of the ideas there had parallels in Debord and other French thinkers and writers from the late 1960s. The content is too rich and the space here too limited to do more than say that in this section the sophism inherent in capitalism is brought to the fore. We speak lightly sometimes of the "marketplace of ideas," but here the "market" aspect is taken more strictly than usual. The argument is that there is a relativism deeply inherent in capitalism that most do not chose to see.

There is a very real sense in which the mystery that is Carlos Chadwick is never resolved. He becomes a leftist during a year spent studying in Paris, but also after a painful break up with his girlfriend and a period of time in which he is ostracized by schoolmates for speaking out against the sexual harassment of several women by a group of men. Carlos's conversion to the left is rapid and dramatic and extreme, but one suspects that there is both an intellectual and emotional component to this. His ideas are well thought out and insightful, but one wonders what role his interpersonal experiences played in all this. That they played some role seems obvious from things he says to his ex-girlfriend upon his return to college after his year in France. But the other mystery is the mystery that Carlos is to the journalist and the former girlfriend due to the sharply delimited nature of their worldview. In the end, I found Carlos's ideas quite congenial, but it didn't keep me from wondering what alchemy of emotional need and intellectual deliberation resulted in his political conversion.

I highly recommend this so anyone who enjoys reading novels of ideas or political discussion. It is especially relevant today in the first decade of the new century, when a corporate-owned media whose independence is sharply delimited by the values and economic needs of its investors is absurdly taken as "liberal," and on top of that not recognizing that being liberal and being leftist are hardly equivalent. In this regard, the novel speaks to today's issues perhaps even more sharply than when he was first published.

Rating:
Summary: A first-rate political novel that speaks to today
Review: First and foremost, this is a political novel. Of course, there is a sense in which any novel is a political novel, in that it reflects to some degree the social and political situation in which it was produced. But THE CARLOS CHADWICK MYSTERY is political in the sense that it seeks to examine predominant American political attitudes in a fictional context. Subtract the political elements from this novel, and you are left with no novel at all. Although a common genre in Europe and Latin America, it is comparatively rare in the United States and Britain, much to the impoverishment of our literature.

The novel tells the story of how Charlie Chadwick, born, raised, and educated in Venezuela by an American father and Venezuelan mother, attends his father's alma mater, the exclusive, elitist Richards College, and is transformed from a lightly political individual to a passionate leftist and possible terrorist who insists on being called Carlos. The text consists of three main sections: an account of his life by a very slightly to the left mainstream print journalist, a self-absorbed memoir by Carlos's bright but not-very-profound ex-girlfriend, and a highly political play written by Carlos. The narrative is situated roughly in the very late 1960s early 1970s, but in a somewhat alternative universe than the one that we remember. For instance, the primary American military intervention is in Peru, and the student protest in the book revolves around this rather than Vietnam. This has the effect of forcing us to reconsider the issues in a slightly different context, an alternative history more effectively exposing the inner logic of actual history. Anyone objecting that the U.S. would never invade or bomb Peru needs to look a bit more deeply at the depth of prior American involvement in Latin America and should recall that in the 1980s we actually did invade Latin American countries on more than one occasion.

The novel contains a wealth of provocative and interesting ideas, and anyone willing to take the book on its own terms will undoubtedly find it a fascinating read. One seeking a mere narrative might look elsewhere. The ideas in the first two sections of the novel are more subdued than in the final section, and consist primarily in the political naiveté of the journalist and the former girlfriend. In fact, although the novel is subtitled "A Novel of College Life and Political Terror," I could not keep from thinking that the real issue was not terror but naiveté. For instance, both fail to perceive the deeply entrenched ideology permeating liberal capitalist society ("liberal" I mean in the broad nonpartisan sense of the broad consensus that informs all of American life; by this standard Ronald Reagan is a paradigmatic liberal). The girlfriend writes, "I believe strongly in America's system of pragmatic, nonideological problem solving," a sentence that that embraces more than one naiveté. It is in the final section of the book, "Perspective Industries, LTD.," that the political issues are raised most sharply. In reading this section, I kept being reminded of Guy Debord and his SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE. I do not know that there is a direct connection, but many of the ideas there had parallels in Debord and other French thinkers and writers from the late 1960s. The content is too rich and the space here too limited to do more than say that in this section the sophism inherent in capitalism is brought to the fore. We speak lightly sometimes of the "marketplace of ideas," but here the "market" aspect is taken more strictly than usual. The argument is that there is a relativism deeply inherent in capitalism that most do not chose to see.

There is a very real sense in which the mystery that is Carlos Chadwick is never resolved. He becomes a leftist during a year spent studying in Paris, but also after a painful break up with his girlfriend and a period of time in which he is ostracized by schoolmates for speaking out against the sexual harassment of several women by a group of men. Carlos's conversion to the left is rapid and dramatic and extreme, but one suspects that there is both an intellectual and emotional component to this. His ideas are well thought out and insightful, but one wonders what role his interpersonal experiences played in all this. That they played some role seems obvious from things he says to his ex-girlfriend upon his return to college after his year in France. But the other mystery is the mystery that Carlos is to the journalist and the former girlfriend due to the sharply delimited nature of their worldview. In the end, I found Carlos's ideas quite congenial, but it didn't keep me from wondering what alchemy of emotional need and intellectual deliberation resulted in his political conversion.

I highly recommend this so anyone who enjoys reading novels of ideas or political discussion. It is especially relevant today in the first decade of the new century, when a corporate-owned media whose independence is sharply delimited by the values and economic needs of its investors is absurdly taken as "liberal," and on top of that not recognizing that being liberal and being leftist are hardly equivalent. In this regard, the novel speaks to today's issues perhaps even more sharply than when he was first published.