Michael Nava
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by Philip Gambone

Over the years, I've had the pleasure of interviewing many fine writers for pieces in journals and for a radio show I used to host on WOMR in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Among those writers was Michael Nava, a Mexican-American poet, mystery writer, and novelist.

I first became acquainted with Nava's writing through a series of mystery novels he wrote featuring Henry Rios, an openly gay, Mexican American criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles. At the time he wrote the Rios novels, Nava was also a lawyer who served as a judicial attorney in the California Supreme Court.

The series of ten novels, written between 1986 and 2021, won Nava many fans and garnered seven Lambda Literary awards. He was hailed by the New York Times, who called him "one of our best" crime writers. The Los Angeles Times praised his mysteries as "faithful to the conventions of the genre, but set apart by their insight, compassion, and sense of social justice."

As a child, Nava was a "dreamy boy," he told me, someone who developed "habits of secrecy and loneliness." He never knew his father. His stepfather—"a vicious person, more a little demon than the prince of darkness"—often beat his mother. "My mother never visited that kind of abuse on us. She was a kind-hearted, loving person. She let me go into the world without laying any guilt on me."

Brainy and unathletic, Nava experienced the machismo ethic of his Mexican heritage. "I didn't suffer directly, in the sense that I wasn't bullied. In fact, one of the things that made my childhood tolerable is that I always had friends. But there was definitely a code among the Mexican boys I grew up with that I didn't get. Basically, I was too gentle, and too sensitive, and too demonstrative."

Reading became his outlet. "The books I read really set my imagination on fire. I wanted to talk to someone about them, but there was no one in my family I could talk to. I had all these things I wanted to say and no one to say them to. That gave me the impetus for writing."

During his adolescent years, as he began to feel attracted to other boys, Nava fell into a double life. "There was the beans-and-rice world of growing up in this poor, Mexican family; and then there was … this swooning identification and desire that was more than just wanting to have sex. Those two things—the fact that I was a very imaginative child and then, at adolescence, that I knew I was gay—filled me with a lot of stories."

In high school, Nava became a compulsive overachiever: a writer of poetry, captain of the debate team, school president, valedictorian. It was a trajectory akin to the one Henry Rios describes: "gay boys compensat[ing] for their homosexuality by excelling at some talent they have."

Spanish-language edition of Goldenboy
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"At least in our generation," Nava told me, "being gay was so fraught with the badge of inferiority that it was impossible to escape that. There were no alternative messages. Many of us took that in in a very deep way and felt that we had to justify the very air we breathed by excelling." Nava went on to Colorado College, where he studied history. "When I was in college, and Mexican American students were calling themselves 'Chicano,' I was excluded from that because I was gay. They were actually quite conservative socially. But I could not deny that I was gay. I could not hurt some girl by pretending an interest in her I didn't feel."

After college, he won a fellowship to study poetry in Buenos Aires, a lonely year that he filled up by reading all the novels of Charles Dickens. Deciding that he was not going to make a living as a poet, Nava went off to Stanford Law School. Once he passed the bar, he began "casting around for a model of how to be a lawyer and also be gay."

The first of his Henry Rios mystery novels, The Little Death, was published in 1986, when he was thirty-two. "I had reached a point with poetry where I was suffering from writer's block. Every time I sat down to write a poem, I felt the weight of six centuries of Anglo-American Literature on my back. Everything had been said, and had been said much better than I could say it. I just froze. Writing fiction … was liberating. I didn't want to write that semi-confessional novel that every young writer writes. I thought if I wrote a mystery it would force me to get out of myself, develop characters, dialogue, plot." As someone who is Mexican American and gay, Henry Rios sees things from the perspective of a double outsider. "It allows him to separate the dross from the gold, that is, in terms of what society purports to value and how it actually behaves. If you're in a system, you tend to believe its hypocrisies. In fact, you're not even aware that they are hypocrisies. It's just the air you breathe. When you're outside the system, you see quite clearly the difference between what a society says it is and how it behaves."

By the second novel, Goldenboy (1988), Henry is sober, a fact that coincides with Nava's own decision to embrace sobriety. "Many of our generation of gay men suffered from substance abuse issues. It was a way to mediate the effects of self-hatred. I was no different. And Rios had some of that, too. I thought it was important to talk about that as one of the effects of the pathology of being hated. And so it's easy to succumb to some kind of substance abuse. It takes so much courage and strength to stand in the furnace of hatred and not to be destroyed by it."

One after another, the Rios novels won a huge crossover audience. "Women really liked Rios," Nava said. Straight women thought he was the perfect man except that he was gay. He was very appealing to them. Through my writing, I seduced readers who otherwise would think that there wasn't anything in a gay mystery that would be of interest to them."

While he never got tired of the character or of writing about Los Angeles, by the sixth Rios novel, The Burning Plain (1997), Nava had become "bored with mysteries. I felt that I had done as much as I could using that particular literary form. The entire machinery—murder, clues, all that—it was as if a poet were condemned to writing only sonnets."

Over the next twenty years, he dutifully wrote four more Henry Rios novels, but became increasingly interested in writing more ambitious works, including a big, sprawling novel that takes place in Mexico City. That novel, City of Palaces, was published in 2014. Nava says that it attempts to present "an alternative view of a particular period of American history. Everyone has an American story and it never begins in America. This is my American story. That's what I want to remind people: that no one's American story actually begins in America."

Like Dickens, Nava's novel incorporates a large cast of characters, several plots and multiple themes—Mexican and Chicano history, the Yaqui Indian genocide, politics, homosexuality. And like Tolstoy, but on a smaller scale, the book includes both a personal story and a wartime panorama, the Mexican Revolution.

All of this revolves around two main protagonists, Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Disfigured by childhood smallpox, Alicia, a devout Catholic from an aristocratic family, feels called to a life of service. She works with the poor of the city, "a wounded and vibrant people, the truest Mexicans of México." In contrast, Miguel is a man of science and an atheist. When he asks Alicia why she was never vaccinated against smallpox, she tells him her father would not allow it. "Custom is the enemy of progress," Miguel tells her. "Especially in our poor benighted México."

They fall in love, marry, begin a family. Alicia's religious faith blossoms into something richer and more complex. She discovers that she cannot "be a true follower of Christ without living as though every moment on earth was luminous." Her charity work takes her into dangerous situations. The second part of novel takes place during the early years of the Mexican Revolution. Nava does an excellent job of wading through the complexities of this history without allowing it to overwhelm Miguel and Alicia's story or the forward movement of the plot.

In a novel crammed with detail, he also beautifully captures the flavor and fervor of Mexico City—the whorehouses, the pulquerías, Porfirio Diaz's "make-believe European city designed for tourists and the notables from abroad." He keeps reminding the reader of the distance between "the silk women and the pauper Indians, the true history of México."

Porfirio Diaz
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In multiple passages, Nava brings to our attention that fact that Mexico is a bi-racial nation—"a nation permanently divided against itself"—which, as Miguel's mother-in-law reminds him, means "to live in the friction of being half-civilized and half-barbaric, the one half always at war with the other."

The novel does not flinch from reminding readers of the sometimes scurrilous role the U.S. has played in Mexican affairs. Nava quotes the poet Rubén Darío who said, "Nothing good comes out of the North. From that furnace of aggression and greed and self-righteousness. All of Spanish America feels its heat, but only México roasts on its spit." In the final pages of the novel, with a war-torn Mexico disintegrating, the tragedies mount.

Rubén Darío
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Among the many prizes it garnered, City of Palaces was the winner of an International Latino Book Award for Latino Fiction. When the novel was published, Nava announced that it was the first in a quartet of novels that would follow the characters and themes into the 1920s. While he has yet to bring out any more volumes in the series, City of Palaces, which one critic said deserves to be compared to The Leopard, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Doctor Zhivago, is a distinguished work of fiction that brings Mexican history and the Mexican people compellingly alive.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of five books, most recently As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. He will be doing a reading from that book at the San Miguel Writers' Conference on Tuesday, February 20.

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