Nicolás Medina Mora, _América del Norte_

 IF A NOVELIST invents a new name for the character whose circumstances map closely onto his own, does that make the resulting book an "autobiographical novel" rather than "autofiction"? I don't have a literary taxonomist handy to answer the question, so I will just note that the narrator of América del Norte, Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar, shares with his creator (a) Mexican citizenship, (b) an undergraduate degree from Yale, (c) a stint as a long-form journalist in New York City, and (d) study in the nonfiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. 

I don't know whether Medina Mora, like his protagonist, grew up in the none-more-elite Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, nor whether his family is as wealthy and powerful as Sebastián's, nor whether his ancestors are Spanish with virtually no admixture of indigenous DNA, but I suspect all that is likely the case as well.

Sebastián/Nicolás's own term for people of his class--"Austro-Hungarians"--is a complex joke based on that class's vanity about their being descended exclusively from Spanish colonizers. The Hapsburgs were the longtime royal family of Spain who happened also to be the royal line of the Austro-Hungarian empire, so Mexicans without any indigenous ancestors are...Austro-Hungarian.

The configuration of Sebastián's identity is a crucial ingredient of the novel. It is set during the first couple of years of the first Trump administration, and Sebastián is sometimes in Iowa City, sometimes in Mexico City visiting family, sometimes in New York City hanging out in his old stomping grounds. 

In Mexico, he is the son of a Supreme Court justice, beneficiary of family wealth and of an elite education abroad, someone who gets (and needs!) a bodyguard. In the United States, though, he is a Mexican, object not just of longstanding xenophobic hostility but now also of state policy, a target for ICE.

Medina Mora stirs into the novel some historical vignettes of Mexican-U.S. relations and of creole-indigenous relations, so we meet the cadets of Chapultepec, Sor Juana, Alfonso Reyes, Jose Vasconcelos, and a good many writers and thinkers as well as many characters that (I am guessing) would be quickly recognized had you been hanging out at the Fox Head Tavern circa 2017.

The question hovering before Sebastián is whether to make his career in the United States or Mexico. He is fluent in both Spanish and English, so he could work in either country. In the U.S., he would have to deal with Trump and Trumpery. In Mexico, he would have to deal with the ascendancy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, who seeks to once and for all undermine the long-standing power of the class to which Sebastián's family belongs. To complicate things, Sebastián's mother is dying, and his girlfriend is Anglo. 

We don't find out, exactly, which way he is going to go. In the final scene, he is in an airport, watching planes depart. Most of the book is written in English, but the chapter titles and a fair bit of dialogue is in Spanish. As if that weren't ambivalence enough, consider this: the book's final sentence is in what looks to me like Coptic. 

América del Norte is a big, cranky, ambitious, witty, brilliant, brimful of attitude novel. And a great read.