Shadows in a New Land : THE MARKS OF BIRTH, <i> By Pablo Medina (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: $22; 276 pp.)</i>

Critics of mainstream publishing’s attitude toward minority authors have long pointed out that the industry is interested only in ethnic autobiography. Certainly this genre makes up a large part of what is best in the growing body of Latino literature, from Rudolfo Anaya’s “Bless Me, Ultima” and Richard Rodriguez’s “Hunger of Memory” to Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street” and Julia Alvarez’s “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.”

But given the rapid proliferation of this genre, one can’t help but wonder upon opening this latest installment: Can yet another Latino coming-of-age novel possibly be fresh?

Initially, Pablo Medina’s “The Marks of Birth” seems to tell a tale common to all of these more or less autobiographical first novels: a young person born abroad migrates with his family to the U.S.--or is born within a Latino family that is “abroad” even within America’s shores. Here he wrestles with the alienation of having been born and raised within a foreign culture and in the process learns to be an American with a difference. A Latino American. Grouped together, these books could compose a saga titled “Birth of a Subnation.”

But while Medina’s novel tells this same story, his style is altogether different.

For one thing, Medina’s narrative lacks the candor found in other Latino fictionalized autobiographies, in which one can feel the author palpitating right under the surface of the discourse. “Marks of Birth” puts a greater distance between author and text, and, therefore, between author and reader. One does not get to know Medina through his Anton, a character who remains a mystery until the very end.

But then Anton is not the kind of character one is meant to know in the sense one knows the protagonists of realist fiction. He has not been brought to life with psychological detail; instead, he wears a birthmark shaped like some kind of map that flares up in moments of crisis. To find Anton’s literary antecedents one should look to the heroes of the medieval romance or Baroque fable rather than to the fleshed-out characters of the 19th-Century novel. However, he is the heir to a kind of coming-of-age narrative that flourished in Romantic and realist European fiction and which would become firmly rooted in Medina’s native soil.

Cuban literature did not invent the Bildungsroman --to call the coming-of-age tale by its more distinguished name. It is a genre that traces its origins to a variety of early forms of narratives, including the Spanish picaresque novel, and that, once realism played itself out, became emblematic of European modernism. Only two Old World titles need be mentioned: “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and “Remembrances of Things Past.” Although to place Medina’s novel in its proper context, one needs to think also of two Cuban titles: Alejo Carpentier’s “Explosion in a Cathedral” and Jose Lezama Lima’s “Paradiso.”

Both of these books, written by authors in the full bloom of their mature artistic powers, not by youths new to the writing profession, place their protagonists in the heart of bourgeois families that are nearly self-contained micro-universes, the kind of setting that is rich soil for the ripening of complex, observant, eclectic personalities. And in both, the protagonist’s journey toward self-knowledge moves in counterpoint through both familial and social history. Typically, Carpentier, though majestically at ease with cultural history, is more fascinated with the political side of social history, while Lezama, the great aesthete, is more engaged with the process of culture, a kind of a historical history.

In Medina’s tale, the history that knocks against the slow, rich unfolding of familial and personal growth is definitely political--more precisely, the politics of the Cuban revolution. But Medina has chosen to take an almost anti-historical tack by not calling the most important event in his native country’s young life--Cuba is barely a century-old republic--by its name. Cuba itself is called “the island,” while its revolutionary leader is named “Campeon.”

It’s a happy artistic maneuver, for it drains the Cuban Revolution of its excessive power of signifying and allows the protagonist to wrestle with History with a capital H, not just the Revolution with a capital R, which is, after all, but a small chunk of History. Medina cuts the Cuban Revolution down to size and by doing so takes History by storm, ripping it from the arrogant hands of its epic manipulators and putting it at the service of culture.

And what simple truths a novelist can tell once he has divorced political “reality.” Here is Felicia, the family matriarch, evaluating her “island’s” revolutionary leader: “The worst thing that could happen to a country was for a rich boy to take it over in the name of the oppressed.”

Best of all is that a novelist can do directly what a historian must labor endlessly to elucidate. The books that analyze the phenomenon of Cuban Miami add up by now to an American sub-genre, yet Medina in just two paragraphs gets it absolutely right:

“Miami in those days was a bleached bone stretching west and south from Biscayne Bay, as if it wanted nothing to do with the sea. Its topography, or lack of it, its square, dull houses, and the grid layout of its streets were perfectly suited for exiles who did not want to be distracted from the past and from the delectable contemplation of their memories. They made sure that whatever life they had in the new land was a mere shadow of what they had left behind. They bought used cars and fixed them superficially so that they were constantly breaking down. If it wasn’t the carburetor, it was the alternator; if it wasn’t the alternator, it was the valves. ‘The Studebakers and Packards of the Island,’ they would reminisce. ‘Those were real cars.’ Their houses, too, were weak, unstable things. Any strong wind would call their permanence into question. ‘Nothing,’ they would say, surveying the ruins after a hurricane, ‘can compare to the buildings of our land. They were built to last. Even the trees here topple over as if they had no roots.’

“The truth was that nothing and no one in Miami had any roots. The city was built on water--or more accurately, the water had been drained from the land so that the city could exist. Left to its own devices, the water would seep back in and the land would revert to swamp and mangrove. Exiles were the perfect denizens of such a place, and they were making Miami, with the ocean on one side and the Everglades on the other, a fervent distorted image of the larger, more permanent island they had left behind.”

Felicia’s move to Miami caps the family’s exile from the island; like most Cuban families they leave their country individually or in nuclear family units only to be reunited in the United States and then be dispersed again by this country’s centrifugal power. The grand bourgeois family--although Felicia’s is grand in depth and complexity, not wealth--is not possible here. Thus, the cultivation of a personality like Anton is not possible either. Which is to say that to reinvent the Cuban Bildungsroman in exile is to do war with the impossible, and, in Medina’s case, to win.

Anton tries to be American. He goes about it with the self-contained patience of a hero in a Puritan morality tale. And he succeeds to a certain extent. Toward the end of the book, Anton has become a lean spirit, cultivating his garden (one of the many acknowledgments that Medina grounds his tale in fables like Voltaire’s “Candide”) and living a marital life that borders on asceticism.

In fact, his heart is cloven by love for two kinds of aesthetes: his American wife, whose singing of the Shaker hymn “Tis a Gift to Be Simple” labels her as a Protestant Everywoman, and a Cuban--er, “islander”--of austere political vision whose dedication to overthrowing Castro--er, “Campeon”--leads Anton to join a paramilitary group training to invade the island.

The aesthetic remove of Medina’s art applies to every aspect of island politics, and he is no more sympathetic toward the anti-Campeon factions than toward the island’s triumphant revolutionaries. All politics, in fact, appears as a dangerous mixture of bluster and betrayal, with only one character, the enigmatic Spaniard Jose Maria Unanue, standing for a kind of political integrity. Fittingly, he is as disillusioned as he is true, a perfect stoic, although how he manages to know and accomplish so much--he sneaks Anton and his parents out of the island--shrouds him in a veil of suspicion.

Jose Maria, in a way, is a kind of father figure, as is Anton’s uncle Antonio--Anton’s true father is rather ineffectual. Antonio, charming and clever as he is, is a man of action, albeit failed political action, not letters, and his nephew is not destined to become a writer--it’s grandmother Felicia who by writing Anton’s biography becomes a kind of literary fairy godmother within the novel. Anton too must act, must do the right thing.

That the right thing is an absurd thing is fitting in this novel in which political action is always absurd or has absurd consequences: Medina reduces his native country’s revolution to a grand absurdity. In the end, Anton is ready. The island is ready. The family’s evolution had led him to the move he must make.

“The Marks of Birth” is a gloriously reactionary piece of fiction in which history lacks the power of family, politics pales before imagination, revolution is but one more trial on the road to redemption, and dialectics can be flipped over like a turtle by a personality that comes to understand destiny.