The Carlos Chadwick Mystery: A Novel of College Life and Political Terror

by Gene H. Bell-Villada

Book Overview

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0938513060
• ISBN13: 9780938513063
• Release Date: February 2020
• Publisher: Amador Publishers, LLC
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

AN ERROR HAS CROPPED INTO THE BYLINE FOR THE AUTHOR!

I am the author of this book! And I must call attention to a cyber-error. Somewhere in your system a glitch has occurred! My last name is "Bell-Villada" and not "Velland-Bell"! Please correct this unconscionable clerical error at your earliest convenience.

A first-rate political novel that speaks to today

First and foremost, this is a political novel. Of course, there is a sense in which any novel is a political novel, in that it reflects to some degree the social and political situation in which it was produced. But THE CARLOS CHADWICK MYSTERY is political in the sense that it seeks to examine predominant American political attitudes in a fictional context. Subtract the political elements from this novel, and you are left with no novel at all. Although a common genre in Europe and Latin America, it is comparatively rare in the United States and Britain, much to the impoverishment of our literature.The novel tells the story of how Charlie Chadwick, born, raised, and educated in Venezuela by an American father and Venezuelan mother, attends his father's alma mater, the exclusive, elitist Richards College, and is transformed from a lightly political individual to a passionate leftist and possible terrorist who insists on being called Carlos. The text consists of three main sections: an account of his life by a very slightly to the left mainstream print journalist, a self-absorbed memoir by Carlos's bright but not-very-profound ex-girlfriend, and a highly political play written by Carlos. The narrative is situated roughly in the very late 1960s early 1970s, but in a somewhat alternative universe than the one that we remember. For instance, the primary American military intervention is in Peru, and the student protest in the book revolves around this rather than Vietnam. This has the effect of forcing us to reconsider the issues in a slightly different context, an alternative history more effectively exposing the inner logic of actual history. Anyone objecting that the U.S. would never invade or bomb Peru needs to look a bit more deeply at the depth of prior American involvement in Latin America and should recall that in the 1980s we actually did invade Latin American countries on more than one occasion. The novel contains a wealth of provocative and interesting ideas, and anyone willing to take the book on its own terms will undoubtedly find it a fascinating read. One seeking a mere narrative might look elsewhere. The ideas in the first two sections of the novel are more subdued than in the final section, and consist primarily in the political naiveté of the journalist and the former girlfriend. In fact, although the novel is subtitled "A Novel of College Life and Political Terror," I could not keep from thinking that the real issue was not terror but naiveté. For instance, both fail to perceive the deeply entrenched ideology permeating liberal capitalist society ("liberal" I mean in the broad nonpartisan sense of the broad consensus that informs all of American life; by this standard Ronald Reagan is a paradigmatic liberal). The girlfriend writes, "I believe strongly in America's system of pragmatic, nonideological problem solving," a sentence that that embraces more than one naiveté. It is in the final section of the book, "Perspect