Word: doerr
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tiny watercolor Mexican town huddles beneath pastel pink and purple mountains on the dustjacket of Harriet Doerr's new novel, Consider This, Senora. An azure bubble of a church dome, crimson and cream splashes of title roofing and whitewashed walls merge in a hazy dreamscape technicolor. The cover seems to promise a self-indulgent, romanticized odyssey into a picture perfect landscape. But the text within reveals nothing of the sort: Doerr's crisp, pacific prose never lapses into kitsch other-worldliness in this captivating portrait of gringos in small-town Mexico...
...Doerr breathes vitality into a flat-tire genre. The past few years have positively seethed with charming, Toujours Provence-like depictions of the rustic life of those quaint foreign folk. Authors tend to subscribe to the crude narrative conventions of culture clash and nation of contrasts, where faraway lands seduce the reader with their irrational, undeveloped, unhurried, unchanging, quintessentially un-Western ways. And readers, doubtless locked in urban sprawl and economic recession, have lapped up such escapist literature with alacrity...
...Doerr avoids these cliches. Although she sets her story in a diminutive Mexican village with a disproportionate expatriate population, she treats her subject with all the originality of Nostromo or, well, of Stones for Ibarra, Doerr's previous book...
...Doerr does more than regurgitate her past triumphs, however. While Stones for Ibarra examined an American couple forging new lives for themselves abroad, Consider This, Senora tells of four Yanquis living aloof from their Mexican surroundings. Rather than engage with their new land, the protagonists live apart, their Mexican adventure just a hiatus in the larger scheme. For them, Mexico is not a country in its own right, but an absence or escape from their former lives...
...Doerr juxtaposes these escapist psychologies with the brute materialism of Bud Loomis, the developer of the community. He jumps America to avoid a hearty dose of tax arrears and irate IRS officials. Before you can say, "Guillermo es tu tio," he has married a peasant girl and started breeding bulls...