The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa

First published in Spain in 2016; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 27, 2018

The Neighborhood is set in Peru during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori. Noted for corruption and human rights abuses (but also for improving the Peruvian economy and waging war on terror, which accounted for his popularity), Fujimori is a tangential character in The Neighborhood, lurking but never seen.

Two couples who are good friends occupy a good part of the story. Marisa is married to the engineer Enrique Cárdenas. Luciano, Enrique’s friend and lawyer, is married to Chabela.

A curfew forces Chabela to spend the night at Marisa’s house, prompting the onset of erotic sensations when Marisa feels Chabela’s ankle pressed against her own. The two women have a passionate encounter, but Chabela leaves in the morning as if nothing happened. Was it a dream? Marisa isn’t sure, but she’s delighted when Chabela invites her to spend three days with her in Miami.

The curfew is a result of terrorism in Peru that lurks in the novel’s background. The MRTA is kidnapping anyone who might be worth a ransom. Terror instigated by Shining Path has caused many businessmen to flee from Lima, but Enrique has stayed. He has successfully avoided adversity until a reporter delivers disturbing photographs to Enrique of an orgy arranged by a Central European businessman a couple of years earlier. Enrique figures prominently in the photographs.

The reporter, Rolando Garro, makes his living by ruining lives with gossipy tabloid journalism. One life he ruined belongs to an aging artist known as Juan Peineta, a professional reciter of poetry who took a lucrative job on television (the enemy of poetry) as one of the Three Jokers, only to be scorned by Garro. Peineta has vowed revenge.

The three intertwined stories — Chabela’s affair with Marisa, Enrique’s blackmail woes, and Peineta’s anger at Garro — unfold in alternating chapters. One point of the story, as applicable to the US as to Peru, is that people love gossip, particularly when the gossip brings down high society. By being the great destroyer, gossip is the great equalizer.

But the greater point of the story is that power corrupts, and that the powerful control the powerless in ways that are both direct and indirect. In Peru as in other countries, wealth can lead to a corruption of the media when the people who control news outlets use them to advance their own ends.

A chapter near the end brings all the stories together in paragraphs that jump from one story to the next, giving the impression of lives unfolding simultaneously. Fortunately, Mario Vargas Llosa structures the chapter in a way that avoids undue confusion.

Entertaining characters provide comic relief while a fair amount of sex lightens what is in essence a dark story about political corruption that (as one of the characters observes) threatens to turn Peru into a stereotypical banana republic. The ending is satisfying and to the extent that the novel is historically accurate, the ending is historically true.

Yet the lightness, the feel-good nature of the story, also makes The Neighborhood less substantial than its subject matter. Llosa seems to be trying to condemn tabloid journalism while milking sexual entanglements for entertainment value — exactly what the tabloids do. And while Llosa condemns political corruption, he doesn’t give the reader a full sense of just how awful Fujimori was. I enjoyed The Neighborhood, but it is far from Llosa’s best work, and not a book that will sit on the top shelf of South American fiction.

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