DANIEL ALARCÓN'S 'AT NIGHT WE WALK IN CIRCLES'
Someone in search of an easy answer might describe the new novel from the young writer Daniel Alarcón as a detective story. But At Night We Walk in Circles is not a book for easy answers, offering up none and eliciting instead only questions and insights that deal with complicated and intricate issues like destiny, identity, and personal agency.
The propulsive tale bears many of the hallmarks of the detective novel, it’s true, offering up heavy doses of foreshadowing and teasing out the plot through twisting turns and sparse details that coalesce only towards the end. The young actor Nelson, at loose ends struggling to making a life in the coastal capital of a nameless South American nation, earns what he thinks will be the role of a lifetime, performing with his hero, the playwright Henry Nuñez, in a touring revival of his satiric drama The Idiot President. Henry’s play earned its author a stint in the notorious Collectors prison during the recent civil war that, as in many real-life South American nations, continues to press down on modern-day society with a legacy of violence and mistrust. The tour takes Nelson and Henry through the barren mining outposts and deserted farm towns of the outer provinces, where they are often greeted with a fluctuating combination of suspicion and respect.
Nelson’s life does end up changing during the course of the tour, which comes to an abrupt end when he is forced to assume another acting role thanks to a confusion of identities, but not in the way he expects. Alarcón, who was named to The New Yorker’s list of “20 Under 40” American fiction writers in 2010, plays with the idea of fate, offering up hints and glimpses of paths untaken and opportunities missed, as Nelson is ensnared both by the vagaries of existence and the demands of the people around him. There is a whiff of Bolaño to the proceedings, in the tale of a young artist trying to find his place and strike out on his own path, in the spare and powerful prose, in the seething undercurrent of danger. The narrator, a journalist, finds himself drawn to Nelson’s story through a quirk of life that brings them into brief contact, and he unfurls his investigations—complete with archival research and interviews with Nelson’s friends and family—with the doggedness of a police investigator and the raw openness of a poet. At Night We Walk in Circles serves as a reminder that we are all looking for ourselves—for purpose and the someone we want to be—that we are all detectives of our lives, sometimes savage and sometimes not.
At Night We Walk in Circles is out now from Riverhead Books.
Jonathan Shia is the editor of The Last Magazine.
