Tale of love, faith plays out compellingly at the border

IT’S a really good thing that Ana Castillo’s acknowledgments are placed at the end of her latest novel, not at the beginning. “Finally, the forgotten underclass throughout the world, whose lives, services, and labor are taken far too much for granted, are remembered,” she writes after the usual thanks. “May one day the leaders who govern over humanity earnestly seek ways to even the playing field for everyone to live with dignity.” Good intentions, to be sure, but who in our cynical world really wants to read a novel by someone who wishes for such things so openly?

Fortunately, the discrepancy in tone between these thoughts and the 200-plus pages that precede them could not be greater: “The Guardians” is a rollicking read, with jokes and suspense and joy rides and hearts breaking, mending and breaking again. It has plenty of what so much American graduate workshop literature lacks: a deeply rooted urgency, expressed with a compelling mix of bruised indignation and bemused tenderness.

“The Guardians” is about the aforementioned field’s foul lines -- the boundaries between Mexico and the United States, between the lowest rungs of the middle class and actual poverty, between belonging and rejection. Four main characters take turns to illustrate the tale. Regina is a middle-aged widow living in the border town of Cabuche, N.M., with her 15-year-old nephew, the ascetic wannabe-monk Gabo. Both are looking for the same man, Regina’s brother and Gabo’s dad, who disappeared while trying to cross the border into the United States and may be held captive by local coyotes. The pair is aided in its search by Miguel, a history teacher at the school where Regina works, and Miguel’s grandfather, Milton.

Castillo gives the quartet convincingly distinct voices -- el abuelo Milton hilariously sounds like a Mexican version of Grandpa Simpson -- but the leader of the pack clearly is Regina, as befits her name. An ideal aunt/ authority figure, she does her darnedest to rebuild her family, even if it means paying dangerous visits to those who traffic in both people and substances.

Regina is also refreshingly down-to-earth and unfazed by Gabo’s near-saintliness. Indeed, the magical realism that peppered Castillo’s previous work has been replaced by a decidedly more traditional form of spirituality. The subtext, in fact, is so obvious as to be not very “sub” at all: Regina is a “virgin widow” and Gabo (short for Gabriel) displays stigmata; a late-coming tragedy involves a flesh wound reminiscent of the one Longinus inflicted on Jesus, except that here a tragic Mary Magdalene-type character is involved. Thankfully, the characters here who opt for faith are far from idealized.

But the biggest surprise may well be the nimbleness of Castillo’s prose, especially considering the ponderousness of the subjects being tackled. “The Guardians” can be a little clunky at times but, for the most part, moves along with the appealing looseness of an oral-history transcript, especially as the colloquial dialogue freely mixes English and Spanish.

Fear not: Meaning emerges from context. At one point, for instance, the hearing-impaired Milton, who loudly speaks in capital letters, teases Gabo for using a highfalutin word:

“ ‘ENGENDERED, EH?’

‘Engendrar. . . It means. . .’

‘I KNOW WHAT IT MEANS, SON,’ el viejito said, tapping la mesita with his long, skinny fingers. ‘BILINGUAL AND A SMART-ASS, HUH?’ ”

Elsewhere, Gabo, a bookish sort, explains that the “Palominos were penny-ante gangbangers compared to los carteles grandes that reign over the borderlands. (Penny ante. I read that in ‘The Jungle’ by Upton Sinclair. It is one of the libros Mr. Virgil passed on to me. But penny ante does not mean the Palominos are not locos.)”

The Sinclair shout-out is eye-catching, and its juxtaposition with loco gangbangers is both funny and clever. Castillo is particularly good at showing how the tough landscape that her characters inhabit is delineated by precariousness -- a sense that the goal posts, be they moral, financial or legal, are always moving.

And she keeps speechifying to a minimum; it mainly occurs when the narrative baton is picked up by Miguel, an endearing, politically minded crusader who’s part idealist (he gets all heated up about social injustice), part hunk (he turns out to be a dashing rodeo rider) and all potential love interest for Regina.

In our fragmented, increasingly niche-driven cultural landscape, it would be way too easy for many readers to dismiss “The Guardians” as “not for me”: not for me because I’m not Latino, not for me because I’m not a recent immigrant, not for me because I’m not struggling to make ends meet, or I may be sometimes, but I’m not poor. Yet this is Castillo’s most accessible effort to date; in fact, were she an indie rocker, she’d be accused by fans of such books as “So Far From God” (1993) and “Peel My Love Like an Onion” (1999) of selling out.

This smart, passionate novel deserves a wide audience. Even at its most awkwardly obvious, “The Guardians” displays a generosity toward its characters that allows it to transcend these self-imposed restrictions on what we read and, to a larger degree, how we see ourselves. This world and these people are anchored in a specific reality, but Castillo achieves what every novelist should aim for: Her characters feel as if they belong to all of us.

Elisabeth Vincentelli is arts and entertainment editor at Time Out New York.