One thing connects the sixteen stories in Carlos Fuentes’ Happy Families: despair at the state of modern Mexico. The first story’s ‘family like any other’ live mostly in separate rooms, clinging to fantasy notions of both their country and their chances within it. Elsewhere we see corrupt priests, faded actors, lovers separated by the expectations of their families, a friendless president trapped in the six-year period of his office, a gay couple trying to survive beneath the radar of a disapproving society. There seems little room for hope. The characters strive to maintain merely the illusion of prosperity and contentment, because they know the illusion is the most they will ever attain.
The stories themselves are marked by a range of styles and a willingness to experiment. The narrating subject is often elusive. Time folds back on itself. It’s sometimes unclear whether phrases are spoken or merely thought. When these experiments work well, they’re very effective. At other times, they can leave the reader feeling that the effort required is perhaps not repaid by what the stories give back. In a clinical analysis, the stories too often skirt the territory of bourgeois comedies of manners. Some do have the density of novels that Fuentes will never have the time to write, but others fade from the mind as quickly as the latest instalment of a telenovela.
If the book consisted only of stories, therefore, it would be hard to class this as anything other than a minor offering of an aging writer. However, what gives the book its real power are the sixteen choruses that Fuentes interpolates between the stories. These brief choruses reveal a different, more desperate Mexico. They are the songs of children murdered, of the Salvatrucha gang, of teenage drug dealers, of the victims of sexual abuse, of immigrants struggling to make a life away from the Americanized suburbs of the middle classes. Written as freeform verse and never stretching for more than three pages, they make for deeply uncomfortable and intense reading. They work as a clever and necessary counterpoint to the stories, but one can’t help wishing that Fuentes had turned his eye on these people for the stories themselves. Instead, we get a book that paradoxically mirrors Mexico’s social crisis: the majority of attention is focused on the small middle and upper classes, while the overwhelming numbers of the country’s poor and disenfranchised working class still struggle to have their voices heard equally.