Season of the Swamp

Herrera (Ten Planets) has proven to be a writer of demonstrated economy, his works rarely eclipsing 120 pages. In fact, his pattern of concision is such that he might more aptly be described as a novella-ist. His latest effort runs a comparatively robust 160 pages, a logical elongation given the book’s subject matter: the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent exiled in New Orleans in the early 1850s, prior to becoming president of Mexico. Hererra spins a speculative history out of this mostly unknown period in Juárez’s life, populating pages with fellow exiles and revolutionary plotters, the novel’s compactness leaving the pages saturated in an indelible expression of mid-19th-century New Orleans: sticky and conniving, perilous and plagued by yellow fever. The effect plays something like a particularly grimy picaresque blended with city symphony—a portrait of a city haunting itself. Unfortunately, the marriage of Herrera’s brevity and the almost mythic implications of both of the book’s subjects—place and person—produces a story that feels freighted with significance but asks readers to fill in such blanks in the absence of any richer development.