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This novel, set in an exclusive gated community outside Buenos Aires at the end of the 20th century, will feel strangely familiar to North American readers today. Cascade Heights is an eerily exact facsimile of any number of new suburban communities in the US, inhabited by people who are overextended and facing financial ruin in a slipping economy, but keeping the truth of their financial problems hidden from their neighbors and, sometimes, their own families. The community is a bubble of privilege about to burst, defended from the outside world by walls, armed guards, and deep-seated denial. The story opens with three dead men floating in a swimming pool. A fourth man, who has fallen and broken his leg at his home, pleads desperately with his wife, Virginia, to take him to the house where the dead men are instead of to the hospital, Before we find out why, we follow a switchback to an earlier time, when Virginia began to sell real estate to up-and-coming Argentinians. They want their children to attend an English-language school, to have the most trendy breed of designer dog, and to join the ranks of the wealthy by living ostentatiously. It's a hollow world full of illusions and brand names and we see it from three perspectives: the first person viewpoint of Virginia, as sympathetic a person as you'll find in the novel; an omniscient voice that withholds judgment on the lifestyles of the rich and vapid; and a collective third person plural that invites the reader into the community as one of its own. The reader becomes part of the "we" in the story, an uncomfortably complicit place to be. The people who see the community most clearly are two children who are not invested in the illusion their parents are so determined to preserve. One is an emotionally neglected orphan adopted by a woman who yearned for a child with the same short-term passion as for a fashion accessory that turns out not to be quite the right color; the other is Virginia's son whose clear-headed cynicism brands him as a troublemaker at school. They meet up and tour the compound at night to spy on its inhabitants, and in the end it is only these two disaffected members of the carefully-constructed Eden who know why the three men died. This millennial edition of Paradise Lost may be set in Argentina, but will seem as familiar to North American readers as an episode of Desperate Housewives, one with a critical edge and a disturbingly ambiguous ending. § Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, December 2010
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