New West Book Review

Cameras are Everywhere in David Bajo’s “Panopticon”

By Jenny Shank, 11-15-10

Panopticon
by David Bajo
Unbridled Books, 384 pages, $29.95

David Bajo’s arresting second novel Panopticon, set on the California-Mexico border, follows the journalist Aaron Klinsman as he chases three mysterious assignments during his last week on the job before the newspaper he works for is to print its final issue.  Klinsman gets the first assignment from his managing editor, who has vanished, and heads to room 9 of the Motel San Ysidro, which he finds an empty except for bits of black electrician’s tape stuck in odd places, and the imprint of a woman on the bed.  He hasn’t been told what exactly he’s supposed to investigate or report on in this room, so he leaves for his second assignment, covering an event put on by a group of masked Luchadors—Mexican Lucha Libre wrestlers.

The newspaper’s photographer, Rita Valdez, meets Klinsman at the Luchador event and then accompanies him to the mysterious hotel room to shoot pictures of the woman’s imprint.  After their work is done, Valdez and Klinsman put the hotel room to further use.  They had been close coworkers for years, but didn’t have sex until this night, one week before Rita is to move to Mexico to begin a new photography job.  “Seven days is right for us,” she tells Klinsman.

Meanwhile, their coworker, Oscar Medem, continues to report on the murders of hundreds of young women in Juárez—disappearances echoed by the mystery woman’s imprint on the hotel bed—and to look after his son Artie, whose mother no one has met.  Oscar is principled, talented, and brave.  He is passionate about his story, telling Klinsman:

“Over the last fifteen years over four hundred women have been murdered in Juárez.  Anyone who cares just a little knows this.  Apparently it’s an acceptable number for us to go about our days, buying shirts and bagel toasters.  But what’s getting lost in all the cries and stomping about drug armies doing the killing, about a violent society that allows femicide, is the fact that two men—known men—have killed at least a hundred and thirty-seven young women and girls for blood sport.  Who knows how many more they’ve buried.  They get to hide inside the mass of hate and murder they inspire.”

Klinsman, stricken by severe insomnia as he chases his assignments, draws dreamy sketches in his notebook of figures from borderland myth.  But as Oscar’s story demonstrates, there are forces at work along the border that are much more terrifying and lethal than any chupacabra. 

The stories these journalists are chasing end up being connected, and Klinsman begins to unravel how when he figures out that the electrical tape in the hotel room was applied to conceal the cameras that are hidden everywhere, capturing Klinsman as he goes about his life.  But no amount of tape can hide all the cameras.  As Rita says at one point, “I think everything you and I do for the rest of our lives can be viewed by anyone who wants to or happens to watch.  Any way they want.”

One of Bajo’s most ingenious creations in this abundantly clever book are the young men throughout the city that Rita calls salamandros—because they spend so much time at home in the dark in front of their computer screens that their skin is pale like a salamander’s.  These mandros watch the video footage collected by the ubiquitous cameras, and compose dream-like movies out of the events of other people’s lives.  The fact that the newspaper Klinsman works for is shutting down is an apt symbol of a society that is evolving from words as its primary means of communication toward images, what the mandros trade in.

All of Panopticon‘s characters are fascinating, but Rita Valdez is especially so, a smart, uncompromising, sexy photographer who always finds a way to “control the light.” Once she goes to Mexico, and Klinsman observes her through video footage, he thinks, “She already looked so different down there.  Not chola.  She looked like someone to be reckoned with on another level, a much higher level.  If she took your picture you would feel it like a punch, and the reel from it would convince you that you were flying outward, spreading outward.  She still carried her cameras and bag on her hip, slung with a gunfighter’s pride.”

Panopticon moves forward with the logic of a dream or myth, which could be annoying or disorienting if a lesser writer attempted it, but Bajo works with masterful confidence in this mode, grounding his characters with enough vivid detail about their lives that they never feel like anything less than real, sympathetic people, no matter how surreal the events of the book become.  Bajo’s crystalline, precise prose also keeps the sometimes-bizarre plot from losing the reader along the way. 

With Panopticon, Bajo has constructed a story that addresses a range of thorny contemporary issues—such as the relentless killings of young women in Juárez, the increasing use of cameras to capture people’s public and private lives, with and without their consent, and young people who live their lives through their devices—without the book ever becoming a lecture on these topics.  As journalists who dare to write about the almost surreal violence taking place around the Mexican border continue to be murdered, the characters Bajo portrays—the last reporters standing after downsizing, layoffs, and newspaper bankruptcies, who continue to report on a story even though it endangers them—become like a band of avenging folk heroes. Panopticon converts the wonderful and horrible particulars of life near the border into a remarkable story and a true work of art.

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