A son sifts through his family’s murderous past

MURDER. Madness. Execution. Suicide. Graciela Limon’s novel “Left Alive” has all of the plot workings of an exciting modern take on Euripides’ “Medea” and the Mexican legend of La Llorona, both about mothers who take the lives of their children.

The novel follows Elena Santos, a reporter at a small independent newspaper in Central California, as she discovers a story she hopes will revive her interest in journalism: the tale of Rafael Cota, a young man who has been sent to a mental institution because he can’t deal with the fact that his mother, Rosario, may be a coldblooded murderer.

Rafael was just a year old, still in his crib, when, in a fit of drunken rage, his mother killed his two brothers and sister as they slept, after Rafael’s father served her with divorce papers. But as Rafael becomes a young man, he begins to believe she is innocent. When the stories about that night don’t line up, he becomes obsessed with the tragedy, and that drives him insane.

Limon’s best work here is in capturing Rafael’s madness: his incoherence, the voices in his head, his life on the streets. Limon hits all the right notes. Toward the end of the book, when Rafael describes meeting his mother at San Quentin, where she awaits execution on death row, the pathos, confusion and ambiguity that he has felt most of his life about the murders is intricately conveyed.

But it is in these very strengths that the novel often falters. Part of this is because of the novel’s conflicting points of view. On the surface, we see through the eyes of Elena as she interviews Rafael for a long piece she is researching about his life and his mother’s death sentence. But instead of viewing him through a reporter’s skeptical lens, the reader mostly gets a verbatim transcript of Rafael’s life story told almost in monologue through vast passages of the book. Because Rafael isn’t so reliable a subject due to his madness, his recollections of the past, as well as his rendering of long conversations he’s had with others, muddy his believability, especially when it appears that Rafael’s father may be the real murderer.

You’d think a reporter working the story of a lifetime would also have done a long series of interviews with the father and others involved in the case. Elena doesn’t. What the reader gets comes from Rafael’s warped reality over a period of what seems like weeks or months.

And because we don’t get enough of Elena’s perspective, we also don’t find out as much as we could about her thoughts on motivations as the story progresses. She is almost a phantom through much of the book, shuffling back and forth between her apartment and her interviews, a vehicle for Rafael’s shaky story to present itself.

There are also problems in the presentation of Rafael’s language. Simply dropping the ‘g’ from the ending of words and scattering bits of slang and profanity between long sentences of mostly standard English doesn’t capture the rhythms of his street talk. He also has the abrupt demeanor of a tough, at least at first, which makes it hard to reconcile the more feminine sound of his monologues with the language tweaked to the street. He also talks too much and too well about his inner world for someone so troubled, giving the story the aspect of being relayed by a social worker or psychologist instead of a reporter.

In very good and great novels, the pages almost shimmer with life and vitality. Good and mediocre works tend to flash brilliantly, then crash and burn. Although Limon’s novel “Left Alive” certainly has brilliant flashes, in the end what could have been a very good or great novel is brought down by what is easy, everyday, expected and melodramatic.

Michael Standaert, a regular contributor to Book Review, is the author of “Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire.”