Talking Big

By Jay Innis Murray

The history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of monsters. Homo sapiens is a bringer forth of monsters as reason’s dream. They are not pathologies but symptoms, diagnoses, glories, games, and terrors.

– China Miéville, Theses on Monsters

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

– Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

The two maps at the front of this novel let you know there will be monsters. They are charming, seemingly hand-drawn maps of the region of Colombia where Every Arc Bends Its Radian sets its action. The second is a blow-up of a section of the first, zoomed in on the city of Calí, highlighting locales that our detective hero will visit. Everybody knows what a map is, by its conventional or dictionary definition. A map represents an area. It shows you what is there. Many maps name the features of the area, and, like the maps in this novel, some maps even provide a key that does the service of keeping the lovely drawing uncluttered by too much text. There’s another tradition in older maps from the days when much of the world was not yet explored. Map makers would label blank spaces Terra incognita for unknown lands, or, more dramatically, hic sunt dracones, here by dragons, warning of dangers suspected to lurk in those places, waiting for travelers. Sergio De La Pava’s maps don’t contain that text, but the blown-up second map has a picture of an alligator and another of a large-mouthed, world-devouring jungle cave. When his Colombian American ojo privado, Riv del Rio, tours Calí in search of a missing young woman, he encounters a number of monsters, including a criminal evil genius named Exeter Mondragon (initials EM, noted) and a worse one after him.

Every Arc Bends Its Radian was published last November by Simon & Schuster. It is Sergio De La Pava’s fourth novel. It is an uneven work, a tale of two halves. The first 150+ pages are a private-eye-missing-person novel that would satisfy many readers of the hard-boiled tradition. De La Pava’s style is witty and observant. In contrast, the last 100 pages are an experiment in philosophical fiction. This veers to a Hamlet-like jousting routine between the detective and two successive antagonists. The villains lean into lengthy villain monologues. By lengthy, I mean as long as 15 consecutive pages. As De La Pava clearly knew how the swerve would feel, he has a character say, very late in the novel, “You’re like a cartoon villain. Disclosing your plan to me while I can still counter it.” As a meta commentary on the chapters around it, my initial reaction to it was frankly bafflement, but I read the novel a second time, and I began to appreciate the dream-like nature of the end.