My Life in the CIA
by Arnaldo Correa
One new novel looks back to the bad old days of 1973 to highlight an underpinning of much classic intrigue fiction: that the alpha-male heroes of such books were not just privileged, but cynical and indolent. Harry Mathews’s My Life in CIA is being marketed as an “autobiographical novel,” an understandable approach given Mathews’s standing as the sole American member of the Oulipo, a French writers’ league that promotes the application of math and puzzles to the creation of fiction.
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Throughout he seems intent on creating the aesthetic effect of a spy story without actually writing one–moments of plausible skulduggery and tension, as when he’s invited to the Russian embassy to spar with a presumed KGB agent, notwithstanding. But when he realizes that his Walter Mitty-esque spy play has overlapped with actual espionage atrocities, namely American intelligence involvement in the Chilean military coup of 1973, the moral core of the story solidifies. “I kept hoping the situation would change, knowing it wouldn’t,” he writes. “The U.S. were going to recognize the new Chilean government. . . . I’d made myself party to a monstrosity.” By the novel’s somewhat fragmented ending, Mathews seems aware he’s started to resemble Graham Greene’s brutish, bumbling quiet American.
Revenge propels the plot as it sprawls into kidnapping, faked deaths, and operational ties between the CIA and conservative Cuban exiles (a cold-war-fiction chestnut, as in James Ellroy’s American Tabloid). But Correa invests his characters with enough detail and color that the reader is absorbed by the conflict between Manuel’s cynical yet loyal cronies, the “true believers” among Castro’s military who want to make an example out of their ex-spook, and the CIA’s middle-aged cold warriors who (with the exception of the payback-obsessed King) are just killing time until Cuba’s collapse. Correa further humanizes the stock narrative of escape and evasion by incorporating a domestic subplot: while Manuel is hiding out in Vermont waiting to cross into Canada and retrieve a Swiss passport, he rents a room from a single mother who’s being stalked by a local prosecutor and finds time to exact skillful retribution on her behalf, an efficient bit of spy sadism that harks back to the original Bond novels.
