The Devil’s Biographer

One Life by David Lida

In Mexico there is a program called The Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program that helps train, pay, and advise U.S. lawyers in handling the cases of Mexicans nationals facing possible execution in the United States. Specifically, as described on The Marshall Project website: “One of the program’s chief purposes is to help defense attorneys construct a biography of the accused—to humanize them. Poverty, family dysfunction, and developmental disability are frequent themes in their clients’ lives. When presented as  part of a defense, such themes can encourage mercy among jurors and dissuade them from handing down a death sentence.”

 

This, essentially, is the background of David Lida’s remarkable novel, One Life. Lida, himself a mitigation specialist dealing with precisely such cases, tells the bracing, often eloquent story of a disaffected American named Richard, whose job it is to travel to Mexico, to remote, often desolate towns, to uncover the fractured life stories of his clients in the always desperate effort to complicate, if not actually temper, the judgment of prospective American jurors. Of course, humanizing Mexican immigrants—according them the basic dignity of a past, a family, a conscience, a dream—flies directly in the face of much American rhetoric today, a rhetoric fueled daily by our increasingly punitive immigration policies and practices, and by the racist vitriol of the president of himself.    

At the heart of this poignant, complexly wrought novel, is the case of a young woman, a Mexican national named Esperanza, who is due to stand trial in Louisiana for allegedly murdering her baby. Richard, an ex-novelist recovering from a recently failed marriage, has been hired by her lawyers to travel to Mexico to assemble, as best he can, the scattered pieces of her past as a means of rendering her anew—as a human being, as a woman of flesh and blood. This proves no easy task, as the people he meets are not only wary of him, a gringo, but often so taciturn, so beleaguered, so fatalistic in their view of life, that it is everything he can do to get them to speak to him at all. What unfolds is a story as harrowing, as trenchant, as it is hopeful, compassionate, humane. Writes novelist Daniel Alarcón, “David Lida’s One Life is simply revelatory. It’s Juan Rulfo meets Raymond Chandler, Roberto Bolaño meets Chester Himes. It’s the American justice system, exposed, and the inside story of the frenetic, cruel push and pull that lures Mexican migrants from their homes to the U.S.. I’ve never read a book quite like this, and neither have you.”

David Lida has also written a collection of short stories called Travel Advisory and a smart, street-level guide to Mexico City called First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, The Capital of the 21^st Century, a city in which he now lives, writes, practices mitigation, and leads tailor-made tours of the various neighborhoods, markets, parks, gardens, restaurants, and museums. If you have never been to Mexico City it’s time to plan a trip there now. 

 

Check out his website:

https://www.davidlida.com/

Peter Adam Nash