This is a book of wisdoms, large and small, about the charms and challenges of Mexico, about the rewards of travel and spontaneity, and about the fierce headwinds of aging, which, unless leaned into, will blow you over.

Paul Theroux, icon of the open road, aficionado of the untrod trail, decides in his mid-70s that instead of going gently into whatever the good night might bring he will follow Kerouac, Lawrence, and Lowry into Mexico, where age garners reverence instead of disregard. “Más sabe el diablo por Viejo, que por diablo,” states a Mexican saying that captures Theroux’s attention. “The devil is wise because he is old, not because he’s the devil.”

“In the casual opinion of most Americans,” says Theroux, “I am an old man, and therefore of little account, past my best, fading in a pathetic diminuendo while flashing his AARP card; like the old in America generally, either invisible or someone to ignore rather than respect, who will be gone soon, and forgotten, a gringo in his degringolade.

“Naturally,” he continues, “I am insulted by this, but out of pride I don’t let my indignation show. My work is my reply, my travel is my defiance. And I think of myself in the Mexican way, not as an old man but as most Mexicans regard a senior, an hombre de juicio, a man of judgment.”

Alone at the wheel of his car, Theroux begins at the border, where in some places a tall steel wall rises and in others nothing more impedes passage than barbed lines of wire or a thin strand of river. He ignores all advice about safety (“everyone will give you ten reasons for not going”) and crisscrosses the political boundary that promises hope to some, but also delivers suffering and death to many others: Calexico to Mexicali, Nogales to Nogales, Naco to Naco, El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, even Laredo to Nuevo Laredo, where bullets fly as narcos kill each other and whatever innocents impede their trade.

Theroux observes, interviews, and engages – with refugees, migrants, journalists, and Trumpista Border Patrol goons. What results is perhaps the most accessible and three-dimensional report I’ve read about this 1,900-mile strip of borderland, where headlines often take precedence over humanity.

As he heads south, through more narco-lands, into the heart of Mexico City, onto Oaxaca (the city) and Oaxaca the Zapotec coast, and finally into the Zapatista compounds of Chiapas, Theroux wields the same observant eye, curious mind, and welcoming heart to immerse himself in experiences unavailable to less adventurous travelers. Theroux is both an old gringo – and a bold one.

As an American man of Theroux’s vintage, and as a cross-border “gabacho” with deep personal and professional involvement in Mexico, I loved this book in part because many of Theroux’s conclusions about the mosiacal mess that is our southern neighbor match my own.

Chief among these is his idea of  “mundo Mexico” – Mexico as its own world. “Mexico is not a country,” he writes. “Mexico is a world, too much of a “mundo” to be wholly graspable, but so different from state to state in extreme independence of culture and temperament and cuisine.”

True that. When friends ask me upon my return from Oaxaca, where I am doing non-profit work, How was Mexico?, it is question that demands another interrogative: Which Mexico? Because, as Theroux demonstrates at depth, the Mexico of the Sonoran Desert is not the Mexico of the Colonia Roma, and the Mexico of the impoverished and besieged Mixteca is not the Mexico of the empowered and enriched Monterrey. Separated by distance, dollars, and dialect, these disparate Mexicos share little more than a national identity (in some places very little of that) and one other thing: the inveterate institutional and social dysfunction rooted in corruption, tradition, and self-preservation that both Theroux and I believe defines how Mexicans live.

“Mexico,” writes Theroux, “is a country of obstacles, a culture of inconvenience.” These obstacles range from “mass murder to serious hardships to mundane inconveniences.” Forty-three university students disappearing, nearly non-existent medical services for the poor, sporadic roadblocks by striking teachers, nurses, or garbage workers.

A land of obstacles. I’d not heard the country summarized with such precise succinctness. It is exactly that – which is why family and loyalty trump everything in Mexico because when no institution can be counted upon, blood and “confianza” matter most.

There are moments when the book lags (an academic pondering on Mexican writers, for example), but they are sparse. They can be endured or skimmed, but they are mere obstacles, inconveniences, that do not detract from Theroux’s telling, which is as rich and as complex as his subject matter.

On the Plain of Snakes is essential reading for anyone desirous of understanding modern Mexico.

***

Addendum: The title – On the Plain of Snakes – comes from the name of a rural village Theroux passes through, San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca, in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. Coixtlahuaca means “plain of snakes” in the Nahuatl language.

Theroux points out that “the most important pre-Hispanic deity in Mexico” was Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, and that the Mexican flag, which features an eagle and a snake, suggests that snakes are evil and eagles are virtuous. But, he says, quoting a Mexican writer friend, “The truth is more complicated than that. The eagles soar in the sky alone, but we Mexicans share the land with the snakes.”  

A writer dies, her book is not done, her husband writes the final chapter

There is no more tenuous concept than time. Hours, days and years are inventions of man, an application of accounting and order to a life whose beginning is mysterious but whose conclusion is both clear and capricious.

Time, as a mechanism, constructs a façade of stability behind which extends a void that defies definition. What we call “today” is a random assortment of instances, each so infinitesimally transitory that we can neither immerse ourselves in them nor extract from them any indelible depth of experience. Tomorrow is perpetually beyond reach, unattainable, because it exists only in our heads. As soon as the rising sun cracks the horizon, tomorrow disappears under the onslaught of today. Our brains are wired for now; every instant of consciousness occurs today.

What remains is the past, a grand mausoleum of dismembered memories. This unkempt charnel house of fading images, distant conversations, and joys and pains exaggerated or tempered by time tempts examination, especially by writers and others who seek to make sense in their lives. But the past is not a single, definable entity of what was. The past consists of only what we remember, and even that is unique in quantity and clarity for each of us.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said the Greek. But what of the unexamined past? Should it be disinterred?

***

When Mary Ann Hogan and I met we were journalists, she a reporter for a big newspaper, and I the editor of a smaller one. I was arrogant, aggressive, and inflated with self-worth; she was everything that was the opposite: sweet, lovely, and brimming with talent.

I fell for her at once, charmed by her Irish eyes, galactic smile, and dulcet ways. But she was taken, by a lucky fellow I’d just hired, Eric Newton. So, I settled for friendship, and we three formed a youthful bond that endured as we aged.

Mary Ann died in 2019, claimed by rampaging cells. Dying is an untidy process that always leaves something – or much – undone. When the lymphoma took Mary Ann, she hadn’t yet finished the book that was to be the culmination of her life’s work, a memoir about losing and finding herself, about leaving and returning home, and about her father, the former literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. The book lacked a final chapter, which Mary Ann had planned to write after returning home from the East Coast to Mill Valley, California.

Before she died, Mary Ann asked Eric to keep her book alive, to make it whole and write the last chapter. In their decades as a couple, she the writer and he the editor, they regularly wove words together. Each nourished the other. So it was a natural thing to do.

***

In the book, Eric describes one of their final conversations:

The last time we went over the manuscript, after we finished, she just looked at me. It was not the please-grab-a-towel look but the deep-blue-sky look.

And she said . . . nothing.

Not a word. No need.

She was dying. We both knew what she was asking. I hugged her pages to my chest.

“You know I’ll do it.”

***

And he did.

The result is Circle Way, a lyrical, deeply personal, honest, and often whimsical collage of Mary Ann’s artful story-telling and her father’s poetic ruminations and ephemeral drawings. It is a three-dimensional memoir that presents the life of a writer shaped as much by what she overcame and what she accomplished as by what her father, despite his professional success, failed to do, which was to write his own book.

“In so many ways,” Mary Ann writes, “I am my father’s daughter. Self-made journalists, we. Introverts, lovers of books and wine. Sufferers of ‘flying thoughts.’ We once held prized newspaper jobs, writing for the masses. But we felt like impostors with nothing to say. At times I still do.”

Flying thoughts, swirls of emotions, the curve of life, the inward spiral, the outward gleam of the nautilus shell. This is the path Mary Ann followed, avoiding the straight lines, accepting the looseness of history and ignoring the conventions of time. She didn’t want to just tell a story; she wanted to tell a whole story, using what was available, what could be grasped, what could be disinterred, and what could be intuited from what she had seen and lived.

We all live with doubt about the rightfulness of the choices we make. Knowing what to do is often more vexing than the doing. Author Katie Kitamura, in her enigmatic novel, A Separation, writes a piercing line that is apt here: “People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment.” What Mary Ann allows us to see in Circle Way is a daughter’s recognition of her father’s discontent and how, using that perception as a beacon, she found a way to elude his legacy.

Acknowledging the prejudice of my friendship, as well as my reading of several versions of the manuscript, I can say Circle Way is a remarkable book. Or to say it in a manner that Mary Ann would approve, I saw the sausage being made and still found it delicious.

One final word: What Mary Ann did, and what Eric helped her do, was not just write a memoir, but create something uniquely personal. Anyone who attempts creative expression knows how difficult that is to do.

Mary Ann, the journalist, did not want to get scooped on the news of her death, so she wrote her own obituary, one about Mary Ann the writer. Here’s an excerpt:

“Mary Ann saw death not as an ending, but rather as the beginning of the final, infinite chamber in the nautilus shell of a creative life. . . .”

***

How to buy Circle Way:

Amazon

Bookshop