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THE GRINGA
By Andrew Altschul
When Americans move to the global south, they are not immigrants but “expats,” which usually means they are rich, simply by dint of their access to dollars, and that they can go home anytime. Having myself lived for eight years in South America, I can attest that it’s an enviable situation. Perhaps the only downside is that you inevitably meet fellow expats like the ones in Andrew Altschul’s new novel, “The Gringa.”
The gringa of the title is Leonora Gelb, a thinly fictionalized version of Lori Berenson, the New Yorker who was arrested in Peru in 1995 for allegedly collaborating with left-wing subversives, and spent 15 years in prison. The book opens with all that Leo, as she is called, hates about her home country: “the sprawled, filth-strewn cities and prim, stingy towns, the metastatic freeways and supersized cars, the factory farms and clear-cut hills and amber waves of subsidized grain.” Channeling her malaise into concrete action, Leo decides to volunteer for an N.G.O. outside Lima, and is soon drawn into the Cuarta Filosofía, a stand-in for the real-life guerilla group the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.
The author of two other novels, Altschul has also written about U.S. politics, with a righteous indignation not unlike Leo’s. Still, he is most insightful when dissecting the romantic allure, for a certain kind of left-leaning Westerner, of a third world country whose social reality seems more black and white, the solutions simpler. After years of alienation at home, Leo finally feels as if she belongs in Peru, “among people who understood that life was an uncompromising struggle, who knew what things were really worth.” I heard similar sentiments from young expats as a reporter in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.
Unfortunately, Altschul fails to convincingly imagine how a young, middle-class American Jewish woman, whatever her priors, could make the leap to armed struggle. Whereas Berenson spent years working for rebels in El Salvador before moving to Peru, Leo’s radicalization is improbably swift, driven in equal parts by ideology and mere petulance. Her Peruvian comrades, meanwhile, read like revolutionary caricatures: “I’m tired of your principles,” one says. “I’m tired of talking. It’s time to act.”
The book is a hall of mirrors. Our narrator, Andres, a failed American novelist assigned to write a profile of Leo (“I’ve been asked to find the real Leonora Gelb”) is himself a doppelgänger, for Altschul. When not belaboring his struggle to figure out his subject, Andres agonizes over his working-class Peruvian girlfriend’s accidental pregnancy. He’s been living large as an expat in Cuzco, a touristy town where Altschul has written elsewhere about having spent time: “I went out dancing almost every night and never had trouble finding company.” This is another American type I have often encountered: men, almost always men, who are nobodies back home, but can live like B-list celebrities in Bogotá or Buenos Aires.
The novel’s sharpest insight may lie in connecting Andres’s selfish reinvention with Leo’s apparently selfless one. Both are acts of privilege, unavailable to people from poor countries. I did find myself wondering, though, how intentional this critique of American solipsism really was. The big reveal, toward the end, is that Andres moved abroad not to take advantage of the luck of his birth, but to forget his shame over the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Immersed in stories about Peru’s dirty war, he has an epiphany: He can no longer run away from injustice. Given the overlap between author and narrator, this tidy arc seems oddly un-self-aware — turning a meditation on revolutionary idealism into an expat’s journey, with the tragedies of the global south a mere backdrop for personal transformation.
