Novel: Avenue of Mysteries

Overview
Juan Diego, an aging performer and storyteller, travels to the Philippines with a friend to tend to a dying man he has known from long ago. The journey is both practical and metaphysical: as he moves across seas and cities he is repeatedly pulled back into memories of a Mexican childhood shaped by violence, superstition and a consuming obsession with a girl he loved. Those two strands , the present caretaking and the old, private wounds , are braided together, so that travel becomes a form of excavation and tending becomes a kind of penance.
The childhood scenes are vivid and often brutal. Rural Mexico reveals itself as a landscape of small cruelties, strange folk beliefs and formative betrayals; the narrator's sexual awakening and early loyalties are complicated by episodes of physical abuse, secrecy and a persistent yearning for intimacy and absolution. These formative episodes are rendered with Irving's customary attention to eccentric detail, dark humor and a willingness to linger over odd, indelible moments that return later as memories or motifs.
On the contemporary side, the journey to the Philippines brings encounters that are quieter but no less uncanny. Caring for the dying man catalyzes confessions, revisits of old obligations and unexpected acts of tenderness. As the present-day events unfold, buried truths surface and small miracles , ambiguous, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic , alter the narrator's sense of culpability and possibility. The narrative moves toward a reconciliation of sorts: not tidy redemption but a fragile accommodation between what was done and what can still be done.

Themes and Structure
Memory and storytelling are the novel's engines. Episodes loop and echo; scenes from youth are retold, refracted and revised by later recollection. The book insists that identity is a composite made of narratives one has told and been told, with the past continually rewritten in light of present loyalties. That process is not always clarifying: memory is selective, mythmaking and self-defense all at once, and the novel probes how that slippage shapes moral responsibility.
Family, faith and the body are constant concerns. Catholic ritual, local superstitions and acts of care intermingle with questions of sexual desire and the lingering damage of physical violence. Performance , literal theatricality and the performances people give their families and themselves , functions as a recurring image: selfhood is staged, and forgiveness sometimes arrives as a line finally spoken. Irving's voice alternates between comic invention and deep melancholy, using large, digressive set pieces to illuminate small human truths.
The book's tone is elegiac with flashes of the grotesque and comic. It offers compassion without sentimental flattening, and its pleasures lie in characterful digressions, surprising plot turns and a humane insistence on the messy ways people try to atone. The ending does not tidy every knot; rather it leaves the narrator in a space of tentative acceptance, having learned that the care offered in the present can both unburden and complicate the past. "Avenue of Mysteries" remains, in its quieter passages and roaring set pieces alike, a meditation on how stories , told, withheld or repeated , are the principal means by which people survive themselves.