‘Velvet Was the Night’ and The Case of the Obvious MacGuffin
Sometimes the fiction-making machine’s levers get exposed.
When you’re a professional writer, it’s tough to just enjoy reading a book. On the one hand there is the mind-crippling jealousy I feel when other writers (read: almost all of them) have more commercial success than I do1. On the other hand, there is the problem of knowing how stories work and knowing exactly what the process of creation is like2. It makes it very easy to spot the fix-ups and little tricks writers use, because I use them too, and we all tend to use them in the same ways and in the same places3.
I’ve had Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia on my TBR list for a long time now, but my TBR list has grown to truly terrifying proportions recently and I had to rent a small stadium to hold all the TBR books on it and then rent some server space from Microsoft to store all the eBooks. Point is: I’m way behind on my TBR reading list, so I’m finally getting around to this one4.
And it’s good! It’s an atmosphere-soaked noir story set in 1970s Mexico City, pivoting off the real-life history of systemic governmental oppression and violence to craft a story that’s centered on people who are blindly scrabbling after something more in their lives: Maite is a 30-year old secretary who’s struggling with the weight of her immense self-loathing. She hates her job, hates her family, and escapes into romance comics, which offer her the only spite from her dull, monotonous life. When her neighbor, the gorgeous, young, well-off Leonora, asks Maite to cat-sit for her and then disappears5, Maite steals a cracked and broken religious icon from her apartment. Maite steals small items like this all the time, getting a small thrill. When Leonora fails to return, Maite begins a search for her, learning that Leonora has hidden a roll of politically explosive film. Maite gets drawn into a dangerous world of would-be revolutionaries, thugs, and secret police.
It’s a bleak story in many ways—everyone has a boot on their neck of some sort, everyone is trapped in grim, joyless lives6—but they can see something better, just out of reach. It’s very well written and I enjoyed it immensely, in part because it gets how joyless and stressful criminality is7. Too many noir stories celebrate thuggery as if it’s kind of cool and stylish, when in fact breaking legs for a living is grim. There is one small problem: The location of the negatives is a bit of a mystery in the story, and its reveal is treated as a minor twist. But I’ll bet you can guess where the film was the whole time just from my description above.
Spoilers! SPOILERS!
So, yeah, the film was in the broken religious icon that Maite ostentatiously stole the whole time! CRAZY. Look, this isn’t a huge aspect of the story, but it’s glaringly obvious and yet all the characters act like it’s an impenetrable mystery8, and thus it’s a bit of a distraction as you read. The problem is that Maite’s habit of stealing small things from people isn’t handled with any sort of depth or subtlety—you can practically see the staples that Moreno-Garcia uses to jam that detail into place early on. Nothing else is done with this personality quirk, either; it just sits there, mentioned irregularly whenever Moreno-Garcia remembers that it needs to be well-established for the little twist to work. It does zero other plot or character work until it’s revealed, and the mentions of it aren’t the most elegant. If you’ve ever read a mystery ever before in your life, these sort of details jump out at you immediately upon reading them. Which means they grate, just a little bit. It’s like seeing a magician palm a card: Once you notice it, the illusion collapses.
I don’t know anything about Moreno-Garcia’s writing process9, but for me this often happens when I back-fill a plot turn. What I mean by that is that sometimes I have a disruptive idea when I’m already deep into a novel, but the idea is so good it’s worth going back and inserting the infrastructure necessary to support this great twist. So if I suddenly thought, heck, Maite should have had the film all along! I’ll think up a way she could plausibly have it without knowing, then go back and insert the detail about her stealing things, repeat it a few times when it can be introduced more or less organically, and spend the rest of my revision studiously looking anywhere but the religious icon I’ve summoned into the story.
Devil’s In the Details
The trick to really blending this detail in would be to do more with Maite’s kleptomania10. She’s presented as a depressed, angry woman, dissatisfied with life11, so her petty thefts make sense from a psychological point of view. One problem is that we only learn about this habit of hers when she’s already in Leonora’s apartment, which highlights the habit as Something Potentially Important. If We observed Maite doing it a few times before she got there, or if her collection of random stolen objects had been introduced before we knew exactly what they were, the compulsion would read more believably.
And that’s the key—believable character traits blend in and fade away and become invisible, which makes any twist associated with them seem more plausible. Moreno-Garcia attempts this, burying Maite’s kleptomania and the religious icon for much of the story, hoping the reader both forgets about them12 but remembers them sufficiently to go “Aha!” when the reveal comes. But it never quite sinks into the skin of the story, never quite vanishes completely.
This doesn’t hurt the story all that much, though. And Moreno-Garcia does so much else very, very well I almost feel like an asshole complaining about this13. But when you know how the sausage is made, imperfections often bother you more than they should. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go bury several dozen manuscripts much worse than Velvet Was the Night.
Next week: House of the Dragging On and On AmIRight?
One of these days I’m going to get out of bed before noon, become a supervillain, and have my revenge by destroying society entirely.
If you’re curious, the process of creation is very much like being a Gremlin when water spills on them: You experience excruciating pain and hideous deformities, and when you wake up a bunch of bizarre things have take shape around you. Often there is booze involved, seldom are there pants.
Did I just casually lump myself in with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Stephen King, and Shakespeare? Yes, and what of it?
The constant joke Book People make about having too many books to read reminds of my zine-making days when the constant joke was how late every issue of your zine was. Book and Writerly types just love celebrating incompetence and shambolism, and I think there’s a lesson in that somewhere. Someone go find that lesson and deliver to me a summary.
Cat People know that asking someone to cat-sit involves a six-week background check process and a 34-slide PowerPoint deck concerning each cat’s preferences and personality, and anyone who doesn’t treat finding a cat sitter like finding a heart surgeon for your infant is an irredeemable monster.
Unlike the grim, joyless lives we’re all trapped in outside the book <stares into the middle distance and drinks whiskey>.
Any time I’ve been in a fistfight as a kid my hands hurt like hell the next day, so I can’t imagine how much Advil your typical thug goes through.
Similarly to my attitude when The Duchess asks who ate all the snacks.
Surprise! My writing process involves drinking a lot. Also watching tons of old Fantasy Island reruns until one of the fantasies triggers a thought. There might be some dancing involved. Subfootnote: Is “There Might be Some Dancing Involved” the title of my memoir? Lord, I hope not.
As anyone who has ever stolen toilet paper from their job just to survive knows, you can do a lot with kleptomania.
So, you know … a person.
Much the same way I hope everyone forgets just about every Youtube video I’ve ever uploaded. Who told us that filming ourselves being idiots would be cool? I have many regrets and many forgotten passwords. Subfootnote: Is “Many Regrets and Many Forgotten Passwords” the title of my memoir? Probably.
Of course, I *almost* feel like an asshole constantly. Then I shake my head and say “Nah, can’t be” and move on. Every time.
My TBR pile is exactly like yours. This seems like a fascinating one to add - I love reading thoughtful analyses and then reading the book to study it. Thanks!
I have to live 30 more years to get through my TBR pile. And that's if I don't buy any more books. Gonna be some regrets, for certain.