When Alex and Elana
move from smalltown Virginia to El Paso, they are just a young married
couple, intent on a new beginning. Mexican by birth but adopted by white
American Pentecostal parents, Alex is hungry to learn about the
place where he was born. He spends every free moment across the border
in Juárez—perfecting his Spanish, hanging with a collective of
young activists, and studying lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) for his
graduate work in sociology. Meanwhile Elana, busy fighting her own
demons, feels disillusioned by academia and has stopped going to class.
And though they are best friends, Elana has no idea that Alex has fallen
in love with Mateo, a lucha libre fighter.
When Alex goes
missing and Elana can’t determine whether he left of his own accord or
was kidnapped, it’s clear that neither of them has been honest about who
they are. Spanning their journey from Virginia to Texas to Mexico,
Mesha Maren’s thrilling follow-up to Sugar Run takes us from
missionaries to wrestling matches to a luxurious cartel compound, and
deep into the psychic choices that shape our identities. A sweeping
novel that tells us as much about our perceptions of the United States
and Mexico as it does about our own natures and desires, Perpetual West
is a fiercely intelligent and engaging look at the false divide between
high and low culture, and a suspenseful story of how harrowing
events can bring our true selves to the surface.
Reviews
“Exhilarating . . . Maren masterfully crafts flawed yet deeply empathetic protagonists . . . Enhancing her dynamic cast is Maren’s remarkable ability to create a sense of place with just a few phrases and sentences . . . An immersive experience . . . A chimerical storyteller, Maren writes with candor and grit.”—Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness
“Perpetual West is an ambitious novel rendered in striking, sensual prose. Maren creates a vivid, precise, and complex sense of place; she shows us how cultural and physical geography shape who we are, what we do, and how the world understands us.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
“Mesha Maren has followed up Sugar Run, her extraordinary debut, with another, perhaps more extraordinary, success. Perpetual West maintains the best parts of Maren: drama, knockout sentences, violence, and complicated love; a successful blend of noir, high literary styling, and cultural criticism. It is, however, a bigger book, balancing several big ideas at once. There's colonialism, wrestling, kidnapping, sexual identity. This is a brave book, one only Mesha Maren could have pulled off.”—Gabriel Bump, author of Everywhere You Don’t Belong
“As with her debut novel, Sugar Run, Mesha Maren continues to expand the understanding of what it means to be a southern novelist. Like a love child of Kate Chopin and Alice Walker raised by Cormac McCarthy, Maren with Perpetual West takes us through a luscious queer odyssey from Virginia to Mexico daring us to ask ourselves what makes us who we are. Is it where we come from? Or where we’re going?”—Jeremy O. Harris, author of Slave Play
“A complex novel full of suspense in the tradition of Under the Volcano. Maren takes our modern mythos of the border and weaves a story that is entirely her own.” —Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig
“Meticulously observed . . . [Maren] does an expert job of showing Elana and Alex’s separate arcs, and their story dramatizes border life in a nonclichéd fashion . . . An admirable . . . vehicle for examining the gulf between the two countries’ cultures and people.”—Publishers Weekly
“The truly dangerous borders Maren’s characters have to cross are within themselves . . . Perpetual West recalls no other novel so much as The Sheltering Sky, as its innocents cast aside their masks and surrender to more elemental truths.” —Stewart O’Nan, author of A Prayer for Dying
“Perpetual West is a remarkable story of all the borders we cross to finally become our true selves. In this vivid and stunning novel about falling in love, finding your way, and fighting for what you want, Mesha Maren masterfully redefines the American dream and what it means to belong.”—Crissy Van Meter, author of Creatures
Mesha Maren
Mesha Maren is the author of the novel Sugar Run (Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Duke University and also serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia.
https://meshamaren.com/
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