Response to the Mixquiahala Letters

     The epistolary style of "The Mixquiahala Letters" does not merely defy linearity, it exposes the impossibility of the proverbial whole story.   Alicia and Teresa's letters are bits and pieces of a larger whole.  Their relationship, like any, is a process.  It evolves.  It regresses.

     Castillo's character development and representation is nothing short of spectacular.  This book is a time capsule between two presumably fictional characters.  While each volunteers glimpses from within, the reader becomes better acquainted with one via the other.  We are reminded that everything is interpretation.  Castillo masterfully assembled the fragments upon which either character might have fixated, and, in turn, the bits and pieces that make up a whole person.    

     As these women divulge their interpretations, the reader, this one anyway, is left with the fear that she will miss something.  Names and dates and times are not the ethos of this novel, but they are the keys to it.  Connections and conclusions exist.  But Castillo does not just set them out for the taking.  Her novel is impressionistic - a hodgepodge of moments and memories that form a collective narrative.  But not too perfectly.  The reader is convinced that the delicate selection is more a result of the clarity that comes with hindsight than an author's contrivance.

     I was tempted, and encouraged by one friend whose input I solicited, to take the cynics route.  Having decried Lorrie Moore's accessibility, and given that Castillo posed so many options, it was a surprisingly un-difficult decision to do the average bear thing and read this book front to back like any other Westerner.  Call it the easy way.  Call it a manifestation of the creature of habit - of doing things the way I know how to do them.  This is the way that I chose.  This time.  I will most certainly revisit this novel in all of its intended incarnations.