Crystal Frontier

Carlos Fuentes's new novel concerns people, rich and poor, who all have something to do with the family of one Leonardo Barroso, a powerful business tycoon of Northern Mexico who successfully exploits his connections to the United States. Barroso controls the fate of strangers as well as family members, and his decisions -- whether to marry his son to his goddaughter and future mistress, whether to sponsor a young gay medical student for his studies at Cornell, or whether to fly weekend janitors to New York City to avoid American labor costs -- carry long-term effects for anyone within his web. Fuentes mingles generations and classes in this memorable novel, vividly illuminating the cultural conflict that rages between Mexico and America. In extraordinary prose, in the experience of love, of loneliness, of heartbreak and redemption, the dramas that ensue epitomize the strange, invisible, dangerous frontier that divides us.