[In the following review of Sayles's novel Los Gusanos, Kenan praises the author's story of Miami's Cuban exile community, acknowledging some difficulties with the overly complicated narrative.]

“Forgive me, my friend,” says Don Quixote near the end of Cervantes's epic, “for having caused you to appear as mad as I by leading you to fall into the same error, that of believing that there are still knights-errant in the world.” But that vision of chivalry didn't die with the old crusader; today its adherents tote submachine guns and high explosives, or so John Sayles tells us in his updated chronicle of dreamers of the impossible dream in his new novel Los Gusanos (The Worms).

Sayles's early work established him as a troubadour of the grotesque. From his first novel, Pride of the Bimbos, he demonstrated a healthy sense of the absurd, featuring a midget former detective who played five-man softball, dressed in drag, and was being hunted by a giant through the Deep South. A novel by turns hilarious and poignant, Sayles showed in it that his was a highly individual vision. This sensibility carried over into his filmmaking, as in Brother from Another Planet, his 1984 film about a horny-toed extraterrestrial aloose in Harlem. Quirky and offbeat, its politics were subtly stated and subservient to a fantastic vision.

Since then, Sayles has become more socially engaged in his work, becoming increasingly a Bard of Lost Causes, as signaled by his second novel, Union Dues, a hard-cored Bildungsroman dealing with a father and son and the proletariat. Here we see Sayles shift to the dreams of the working man. In his last two films, Matewan (which chronicles a defeated coal miners' strike in the 1920s) and Eight Men Out (the sad tale of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal), his concerns begin to solidify the plight of working-class folk into a tragic and Quixotic set piece of Little Men versus Big Men, in which the former are hopelessly outnumbered and are defeated in body if not in spirit.

In Los Gusanos, Sayles pulls the same sled forward and offers us a salacious, insightful and emotionally provocative novel of the Cuban exile community in Miami—the ones Castro called “worms” upon their exodus—and of their lost homeland. The book's dramatis personae (it's chock full of characters) rivals some of the more plentiful novels of memory. To call this work a family saga belies its intricate structure and serious purpose; to call it a novel of espionage and intrigue and terrorism betrays its depth of characterization and occasional prose excellence; to call it a novel of obsession is only to begin to see it whole. For obsession is the poison and the balm at work in Los Gusanos, an obsession with Cuba.

Sayles's Cuba is at once the Land of Nod, Canaan, Mahagony, El Dorado and Troy, a land that is all things to all people, especially the people who can't possess it. To these people Cuba has become La Mancha, equally distorted and Never-Neverish, and for our protagonist, Marta de la Pena, less the isle of her childhood than the emblem of the shadow of what her family once was.

La Familia de la Pena. For decades they had been gran rancheros on their kilometers-big homestead outside the central-island town of Camagüey. In 1981 this clan teeters on the brink of extinction, still dominated by the bullish Scipio, now cataleptic with rage in a geriatric hospital in Miami. In this year Marta, a nurse in the hospital in which her father languishes, remakes herself in the image of Joan of Arc and prepares to embark upon her holy mission: to strike a blow at Castro. When confronted with the seeming lunacy of her mission, she says, “I know. But what we will do will speak louder. If you can only be a small flame, … you have to burn brightly.” Sayles does not contradict such incendiary passion; rather, he attempts to lay bare the heart of this obsessive, patriotic madness.

A woman of disturbing mystery and depth, Marta carefully recruits her troops: Padre Martín, a defrocked priest and political naïf; Tío Felix, the younger brother of Scipio, the man with the boat and the doubts, whose memories of Cuba retain the seeds of shame and defeat; Dewey, an orderly at the hospital, a legend in his own mind, dangerously full of Rambo and Clint Eastwood, a wannabe soldier of fortune without a cause; El Halcón, assassin, pornographer, whoremonger, spy, a man who even in his days as a policeman under Batista relished inflicting cruelty; and, finally, the spirit of Ambrosio de la Pena, the poet of the family, who died in the Bay of Pigs invasion, leaving only his diary of the event to fuel Marta's Holy Crusade.

The diary illuminates this whirligig of a plot, which is a spiral gaining momentum through the shucking off of onion-like layers of memory and action that are wed to an ever-present irony and paradox. “Paradox in history,” as one of the characters, Villas, says late in the novel. Villas is a professor imprisoned for not submitting to the Fidelistas, whose travails bear strong resemblance to those eloquently reported in Armando Valladares's Against All Hope. During a hallucination in solitary confinement, Villas treats us to a history lesson: “Students, we must always be aware of the disharmony between the popular perception of government and its actual practice. The ideals of a political movement and the methods used to obtain those ideals are often at odds.”

This view informs the plot of Sayles's novel, for at its center sit lies, like the worms of its title, big lies and little lies that gnaw away at its core; big lies like the C.I.A.'s involvement in promising to repatriate the Cubanos in 1961. (The lie, of course, which led to the embarrassment of the Kennedy Administration and to scores of deaths in the huge misadventure at Bahia Cochina.) The other lies are the infidelities of Castro, the betrayal of faithful men like Che Guevara and the men and women who wanted change but not what the revolution eventually became. And as lies tend toward confusion in Los Gusanos, we see how these exiled Cubanos are kept in a state of turmoil both hopeful and full of despair. Sayles points an angry finger at the machinations of the F.B.I./C.I.A./Tío Sam, which we are led to believe still persist, a sinister ballet of entrapment that is one of the mainsprings of this novel, as people are deceived, manipulated and eliminated.

With these tensions Sayles constructs a narrative both inevitable and surprising, and along the way he imparts a great deal. In fact, the author seems to know too damn much, from the grungy details of hospital dirty work to esoteric munitions technology to whorehouse specialties in La Habana before the revolution. His background on C.I.A. involvement is frightfully convincing, and in the character of Walt, an operative, we are given a chilling indictment of how a military-industrial complex values people according to how easily they can be manipulated, or pumped for information.

This is not to say that the novel is without problems. Some digressions seem to serve a purpose more political than narrative; the language, though at times lyrical, is uneven; and ultimately, the equation the novel sets up seems to have more variables than can be solved, and the reader works hard for diminishing returns. The role of women seems, despite Marta's action, subsumed by machismo. Marta as a woman is never truly glimpsed; she is overwhelmed by a masculine vision. While Sayles keeps alive the spirit of the Cuban poet/scholar/saint José Martí in allusions throughout the novel, for all intents and purposes Los Gusanos is still a yanquí novel having more in common with Dickens and Fielding than with Borges or Infante—yet this does not obviate its ambitious effort. Of late a number of young U.S. writers have attempted to pierce the “banana veil,” most notable among them Denis Johnson with his Stars at Noon about Nicaragua, Robert Boswell with his The Geography of Desire about El Salvador and Thomas Sanchez with Mile Zero, like Sayles's novel set in Miami. But Sayles ups the ante and raises the stakes by plenty in daring to write approximately a sixth of the novel in Spanish. Not overwhelming, but enough to give some yanquís pause; he also resorts to Spanglish.

Some will no doubt wish to compare Los Gusanos with recent works by writers of Cuban lineage, like Christine Bell's The Perez Family or Oscar Hijuelos's transcendent novels Our House in the Last World and The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, or even the works of the late Reinaldo Arenas. Some may be alarmed at the audacity of a white boy from Schenectady daring to presume to write knowingly about such an insular community. But Sayles's portrait of a community in exile and a Cuba decades gone hums with a conviction that cannot be dismissed lightly. In a fierce way, Los Gusanos is convincing and speaks to yanquís and Cubanos both of the power and pathos of those present-day knights-errant who are not so much tilting at windmills as shooting BB guns at the twin-headed chimera of history and power—in the eternal Bay of Pigs.