As Maya Vidal writhes on a filthy mattress, hog-tied with an electrical cord, she wonders how much worse this confinement by killers is going to get once the pangs of her drug addictions kick in.
Readers of Isabel Allende's new novel, “Maya's Notebook,” may well wonder what else can possibly happen to this disheveled, homeless young woman. She's already seemingly hit bottom about a dozen times. Is this finally it? Is this maybe the end of her?
On the surface, we've seen this familiar fable many times before, from "Go Ask Alice" on. Addiction, recovery, relapse, re-recovery, bad men and an anchoring cast of surrounding characters who serve as magnets to the straight and narrow.
That narrator, Maya, recounts her story through the notebooks she has kept during her frenetic ride into young adulthood. Maya obviously knows how to tell a tale. She begins: "A week ago my grandmother gave me a dry-eyed hug at the San Francisco airport and told me again that if I valued my life at all, I should not get in touch with anyone I knew until we could be sure my enemies were no longer looking for me."
Maya, 19, is flying to her grandmother's native Chile, where she will journey farther to a hideout in a small village in Chiloe, the archipelago off the coast. In a series of brief entries, she alternately shifts between past and present, recounting what has forced her to this remote, strangely healing place.
Since her "memory goes in circles, spirals, and somersaults," Maya decides to safely get down the facts of her family's story first. The people who become her grandparents fled Chile following the 1973 military coup (Allende's uncle, Salvador, the country's president, was killed in the takeover.) The pair meet during a Canadian exile. Their son grows up to be a pilot and marries a Danish flight attendant. The marriage doesn't take, and they cavalierly deposit their little girl, Maya, with her grandparents. The older couple now lives in a grand, colorful, old house in Berkeley, Calif., where Maya encounters wisdom, love and an atmosphere laced with folklore.
All is well until Maya turns 16, when — almost without warning — her life jumps the rails. She falls in with a couple of bad kids and starts drinking, drugging and goth-ing up. Her little posse quickly advances into crime. They answer ads placed by men looking for young girls and then violently blackmail the sleazes.
When Maya is involved in a car accident, she's forced to head up to Oregon for rehab. She escapes, but in short order is raped by a truck driver and ends up in Las Vegas, where she instantly falls under the spell of a medium-time criminal. As his courier, Maya delivers drugs to customers in the hotels and casinos and also witnesses his involvement in a counterfeiting scheme. When things go south, she's back in big trouble. Maya goes on the lam and is soon strung out and homeless on the back streets of Vegas. Her captivity on that mattress in the drug den quickly ensues.
With the miraculous help of friends and family, Maya ends up on the plane to Chile (but not before — in a scene like something out of "Breaking Bad" — burning satchels of possibly fake dollars in the desert).
Whew! This Maya's a handful. Though Allende artfully and compellingly depicts her fall from grace, the depths Maya reaches — repeatedly — and her willingness to often dig herself into a deeper hole put a nagging strain on belief.
What sets "Maya's Notebook" apart from the usual teen-in-trouble fare is the soaring redemption Maya finds in Chile. The village's peaceful pace is a tonic to both Maya and the reader. Sheltered from the havoc, she is introduced to a world of simplicity and everyday magic. It's a place where the food comes from the earth and the sea, where all property is ultimately communal, where sea lions can become friends, where drugstore medicines are used only when all other remedies fail, and where the dead sometimes make appearances.
Maya gradually comes back to life in this land of legend and folklore, helped also by the good "witches" of the island, the women who meet on the nights of the full moon for hours of sacred talk and sharing. She also unravels a few potent family secrets along the way for good measure.
While not terribly deep (and too terribly obvious in its intentions), "Maya's Notebook" is still a captivating read by a great storyteller. Allende may be overly explicit in contrasting Good Maya and Bad Maya, but it's the other dichotomies she teases out that ultimately give the novel its punch: the old world versus the new, North America versus South America, youth versus age, urban versus rural, and how the real and the unreal can unexpectedly intersect.
John Barron is the former editor-in-chief and publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times. He lives in Oak Park.
