Leaving a Mark

Forrest Gander’s The Trace is a compelling—one might say stunning—novel. I would place it in the tradition of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947). Though it’s not as linguistically ravishing and reckless, it surely spirals on the same downward trajectory to a Mexican hell. The Trace comes to us with the blistering heat of Cormac McCarthy. Like Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky (1949), another Conradian tale of the white man as interloper in unfamiliar terrain, it rivets on the tension between an unmatched couple on a sort of literary pilgrimage that get detoured into a devouring desert.

The two pilgrims in Gander’s spare, exquisitely chiseled story are Hoa and Dale. Hoa is a potter, daughter of a Vietnamese woman who had worked as a clerk in the American Embassy in the late 1960s and married an American accountant. Hoa studied art at the University of North Carolina at Ashville where Dale teaches history, and where they met in the library stacks.

Married for twenty years, their lives have become transformed by their only son’s auto accident. Declan has had a painful recovery, and just prior to completing his undergraduate work, he drops out and disconnects entirely from them. Headstrong, anti-authoritarian, given to spasmodic argumentativeness, Declan has vanished in an angry void. In the wake of his absence, Hoa blames Dale; she relies on sleeping pills, and he relies on anti-anxiety medication. They both feel depressed and somehow guilty.

Waiting to hear some word, a telephone message assuring safety, months pass, and their marriage becomes mechanical: take-out food eaten on TV trays. During his summer break from teaching, as part of a book he is writing, Dale decides to pursue the actual trail of Ambrose Bierce, perhaps the best-known disappearance in American literature. A caustic journalist and short story writer, Bierce decided in 1913 to interview the Mexican rebel Pancho Villa, despite his lack of Spanish. Crossing the Texan border at El Paso on horseback, he reputedly joined Villa’s forces near the city of Chihuahua. There, all traces of his existence end, and the probability is that wounded in a skirmish with Mexican federales, his remains lie in an unmarked grave. But there are various versions of his death—enough for legend—and Dale is on a search for traces. Hoa decides to accompany him although he warns there will be hours and hours of driving.

The couple flies from Ashville to El Paso where they rent a Chevrolet Prizm to proceed south and visit the places near the Chihuahua desert that Bierce is supposed to have explored—a silver and zinc mine called La Hacienta de los Muertos, a battlefield and several small towns. The desert with its vertical canyon walls, volcanic massifs, and serrated mountains is a moonscape of cacti and yucca, mesquite and brush in sand. The desiccating threat of its heat shimmer, and the lacerating sun becomes a dominating presence in the novel, “a terrain so brutally indifferent to human beings that, but for the road, it managed to repel almost any trace of the world’s most aggressive species.”

The journey is demarcated by bizarre occurrences. The novel begins with a short graphic scene of macabre Aztec horror near a town called La Esmeralda where a Mexican drug bandit with a bobbing head methodically skins the decapitated head of a victim and drapes the skin over a soccer ball; the quartered remains of the same body are later manifested to Dale and Hoa when they reach the zocalo of Esmeralda. As they proceed on their journey, they see hovering vultures and rattlesnakes, spiders, a giant tarantula, and later an “inky torrent” of bats streaming out of a cave in which Dale seeks shelter. Portents appear along the way: the memento mori on the sides of the road commemorating crashes; a dog sitting on the road mourning another dead dog. Weirdly, while driving, Dale compulsively admits the memory of a college acid trip that ended in an underground crawl in a...