‘The Search Committee’ Is a Subtle Rebuke of the Border Literary Canon

The opening pages of Jos Skinner s new novel The Search Committee seem to promise readers a merciless academic satire set in Texas Rio Grande Valley The first character introduced is a cringey assistant professor William Quigley originally from Minnesota and presently decked out in what he calls his best tierra caliente outfit linen pants guayabera Panama hat and huaraches Quigley teaches a sophomore-level discipline on English-language novels about Mexico and likes to refer to his adopted home region as Greene-land a nod to Graham Greene s depictions of tropical outposts where no one can be trusted As we meet him Quigley is waiting at the airport to greet a prospective departmental hire the PhD novice Minerva Mondrag n whose abstruse dissertation on the Mexican comic book series La Familia Burr n he amusingly deconstructs in his head Then just as we re settled in for a spicy takedown of petty campus egos in the land of Confines Studies Skinner reveals that he has something else in mind Before heading back to campus Quigley and Mondrag n decide to slip across the perimeter to the Mexican city of La Reina a fictional stand-in for the cartel-violence-plagued Reynosa in pursuit of a more authentic margarita She gets kidnapped and he gets in over his head trying to find her and bring her back without risking his tenure Suddenly the academic satire has shifted to a new register taking on much heavier subject matter It s a risky gambit with real pitfalls to dodge but Skinner pulls it off Along the way The Search Committee paints scene by scene a rich regional landscape as the story twists and turns through various settings and milieus Skinner s breezy lack of pretense is refreshing for a book taking on such fraught topics as narco-violence and the U S -Mexico perimeter but his humility disguises real sophistication Skinner knows this material inside and out and he s delivered a convincing vision of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in these dark times Skinner was born in Puerto Rico raised in Mexico City and earned a graduate degree from the famed Iowa Writer s Workshop For a great number of years he directed the bilingual MFA at the University of Texas-Pan American later renamed the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg clearly the model for the fictional Bravo University in The Search Committee He has previously published two volumes of short fiction The Tombstone Race and Flight and Other Stories but this is his first novel In he co-founded the Alienated Majesty bookstore in Austin which has hastily become the city s bulk reliable outlet for literature in translation and sought-after small-press books not to mention a key space for lefty events in an era of political clampdown at the nearby UT-Austin campus Skinner s biographical advantages make him an ideal candidate to take on his material Yet it s typical of his approach that his main protagonist is not particular self-assured reflection of his own qualifications but rather Quigley a dopey gringo vacillating between colonial-gaze fascination and fear of a world he doesn t understand Quigley also serves conveniently as a way in for readers hoping to learn something about both the Rio Grande Valley and the inner workings of cartels At every twist Skinner doles out nuggets of local knowledge often with a dash of political commentary For example Mondrag n s kidnappers are discussed as ni nis young men who ni trabajan ni estudian bottom-caste margin kids who get by on cartel payouts When Quigley returns to Bravo University alone and turns for advice to his students they school him on the types of kidnapping he might be dealing with levant n disappearance express quick tour of ATM machines with immediate release secuestro holding for ransom and virtual fake attempt to ransom a person not literally kidnapped As it becomes clear Mondrag n is being held in secuestro Quigley increasingly comes to rely on one of his cartel-savvy undergraduates not only for advice but as a go-between Through this character Omar we re treated to a glimpse of how American-side smuggling operations work with the sort of peaceful top-down corruption that once prevailed in Mexico but was lost to the spiral of violence in the post- era Busts of safe houses hiding drugs or people happened regularly but hardly ever violently and often without arrests the brokers having been tipped off and fled As long as the facilitators got to move a reasonable amount of product and the executives were able to replenish their coffers with a reasonable number of forfeitures everybody was reasonably happy As the stakes of the novel rise we re treated to inside views of both upper cartel management and U S intelligence services on border-region college campuses We also get to hear various characters analyses of what s gone wrong to cause the explosion of violence from NAFTA killing corn as a cash crop for Mexican farmers to a fragmented criminal landscape resulting from the War on Drugs-era targeting of cartel leaders The book s -level lesson in Cartel Studies alone is worth the price of admission but The Search Committee s subtlest charms lie in Skinner s ongoing critique of literary writing in English about Mexico and the confines Alongside Greene William S Burroughs and Malcolm Lowry come in for ridicule for essentializing Mexico respectively as a sinister place and a land with an underlying ugliness a sort of squalid evil Do these tequila-soaked Anglos know enough to pass such judgments Skinner seems to ask or are they just filling in the blanks of their local expertise with portentous nonsense Skinner reserves his best jibes for Cormac McCarthy the dearly departed dean of Texas dividing line literature Midway through the novel another professor character drives alone through the scrubland northwest of the Valley what he calls No Country for Old Men territory As he drives he unfurls in his head gobs of overwrought limit prose The sun deployed in unmoved moving above the barren ungodded unsaged despoblado drawing forth tottering crenulations of towered heat It s a good McCarthy spoof For Skinner though it s also a gauntlet thrown to remind us of what he s not doing covering for a lack of nuanced local knowledge with pseudo-visionary inherited notions of the innate violence of the borderlands Instead he walks us through the region as one gives a tour of one s hometown Maybe the the greater part memorable scene in the book is a minor one set in a bar on the U S side of the confines devoted to movimiento alterado or the middle-class cosplaying of narco custom There s a Santa Muerte in a grotto by the bar no one leaves her any money The bartender complains that he s similarly treated The tips aren t that great here If these guys were the real thing I d get a Benjamin every now and then I see a hint of Skinner the under-appreciated novelist in that bartender The author s light-as-a-feather comedy is powerful enough to make us reconsider what the real thing is when it comes to English-language literature about narcos and the frontier and to convince us that he might know better than his more famous peers how to get it right The post The Search Committee Is a Subtle Rebuke of the Confines Literary Canon appeared first on The Texas Observer