This new twist on the expatriate novel, somewhere between mystery and ethics conundrum, with nods to Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, and Paul Bowles, is about two very different men and their delayed but fated battle for retribution. Paul is a promising med student from the US wending his way through heady, corrupt and gorgeous Mexico City in the 1980s. Victor is a Mexican lawyer with a web of connections on both sides of the drug business, and Victor is Paul’s would-be cultural as well as underworld guide, who eventually betrays him. What happens when the former friend reappears twenty years later as a cancer patient in the doctor’s pathology lab shows that none of us can escape our secrets.
Flashing between the post-9/11 US and 1980s Mexico, The Cleansing details a love triangle, or diamond, if you will. Adele, a fearless American and photojournalist, attracts both Paul and Victor, and the three become uneasy friends. Mexico City itself is the fourth player in this game, beautiful and decadent, urban and cosmopolitan, torn between policia and narcos, with the division not as clear as the expatriates first think.
The Cleansing is about a reckoning of moral culpability in a corrupt setting. No matter our excuses, the past will come to find us.
