Contemporary Authors

• The Infinite: A Novel - 2016 Harper Perennial, New York, NY

• Nicholls State University - https://www.nicholls.edu/language/faculty-staff/mainieri-nick/

  Mainieri, Nick

  Mainieri, Nick
  Title: Assistant Professor of English
  Department: Languages and Literature
  Email: nick.mainieri@nicholls.edu
  Phone: 985-449-2647
  Office Location: 246-F Peltier Hall
  B.A., University of Notre Dame; M.F.A., University of New Orleans

  Creative Writing Advisor

• Tin House - http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/44439/get-up-every-day-and-do-an-unseen-thing-a-conversation-with-nicholas-mainieri-needs-proof.html

  QUOTED: "While writing, I ... read the collected poems of Octavio Paz, often Eliot Weinberger’s translations when necessary. Paz has a line in a poem called “Niña” that lodged itself in my head. I kept coming back to it again and again: Es transparente el infinito. I started thinking about the eternal, the essential—the transparency of it, in this sense, implies something separate from mere invisibility."
  "It implies to me a lens through which we obsess over the temporal, and perhaps the inconsequent, but we don’t recognize that the lens exists. It asks us to consider what we are maybe failing to notice because what we don’t see is often the most indispensable, the most crucial. For The Infinite then, I was thinking about New Orleans, where I live and where this story begins. I was thinking about those who came and rebuilt the city. I was thinking about young people, marginalized, ignored—their experiences becoming casualties or collateral damage of so-called progress."

  Get Up Every Day and Do an Unseen Thing: A Conversation with Nicholas Mainieri
  By Andrew Ervin | October 17th, 2016 – 07:00 am
  interview banner

  I first encountered Nicholas Mainieri’s fiction in those great baseball issues that Hobart used to put out every spring. His first published story “The Tools of Ignorance,” which appeared in the spring of 2008 and was titled after an old nickname for a catcher’s gear, carried itself with such authority and deep-in-the-grain understanding of our national pastime that it stuck with me for months afterward. Later that same year, I accepted a two-year position at The Southern Review at Louisiana State University, and, knowing Mainieri lived nearby, I looked him up and we began to meet regularly to watch baseball—my beloved Phillies won the World Series that fall—and talk about writing stories, including a novel he was just beginning to formulate. Back then, his book had a sort of Heart of Darkness sound to it.

  When I got the chance to guest edit an issue of The Southern Review devoted to stories, essays, and poems about baseball, Mainieri may have been the first person I reached out to. (Other contributors included Pat Jordan and Witold Gombrowicz.) His story in that issue, “This Game Do That To You,” contains what remains one of my all-time favorite lines in a work of fiction, in which a less-than-charitable clubhouse attendant refuses to console a player who strikes out to end a low minor-league game: “‘Not your fault tonight, big fella,’ Leroy say. ‘Blame the fucking scout what signed you.’”

  In the years since then, I’ve watched Mainieri’s voice and his vision grow even sharper and more nuanced, more fluent in different vernaculars and capable of deeper emotional resonance. His stories have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Salamander, Sou’wester, and he now appears to be part of the house band at The Southern Review, with three stories in those esteemed pages. The arrival of his star-crossed, coming-of-age debut novel The Infinite (Harper Perennial) signals the next step of an already marvelous career. Emailing with him about it in early October felt like old times, like the sort of conversation we used to have along the first-base line at Alex Box Stadium at LSU.

  Tiny-House

  Andrew Ervin: Tell me about the route you took from your first published story “The Tools of Ignorance” to having copies of your first book arrive at your door.

  Nicholas Mainieri: Thinking about it now, it was eight years, just about to the day, from that story’s publication online in a Hobart baseball issue to a box of The Infinite galleys showing up at my house. You and I became friends because of that story, man! It was published alongside your great “Phillie Phanatic” story. The phrase “the tools of ignorance,” in baseball, describes catcher’s equipment—the implication being that catchers, were they any smarter, would play another position. As a former catcher, I like the phrase. It can be tongue-in-cheek, but it also suggests something about the hard work of existing at the game’s heart. And it seems to me now that toiling in the dirt and getting the crap kicked out of you for little glory provides a good analogy for the route from first published story to debut novel—or for the writer’s life itself. Work really hard, focused on whatever seems most essential. Experience a lot of rejection. Major successes occur mostly in obscurity (appreciated, if you’re lucky, by your family, and the writer-friends you’ve made, who understand). But, in general, “success” only means that you get up every day and do an unseen thing. It takes a long time to finish a novel and a long time to find a home for it. Someone might glance at those solitary years of work and wonder why in the hell you’d want to do that. I can take pride in that, and hope that I’ve made a thing that will be useful to someone somewhere. Anyway, hefting that box full of copies of the real thing was just really cool.

  AE: What was the hardest part of writing the book?

  NM: I don’t know how you or other novelists feel, but I found rewriting a novel to be especially hard—in both practical and intellectual ways. I get all screwed up when I try to edit a piece of writing in an existing document. When I rewrite I literally have to retype. Physical, marked-up manuscript on desk, new blank document on screen. By the end of this novel, I had retyped the complete draft from start to finish nine times. Inefficient, maybe, but it was the only way I could get it done. It was also best from an intellectual standpoint, however. Writing a story requires one really long sustained thought, one trail of logic—if this then this, over and over. But there’s a spirit hidden in there, too, somehow. The characters’ experiences become a kind of proof for ideas only understood through the rigor of repeating (rewriting) that complicated sequence again and again.

  AE: I’m not letting you off the hook that easily. What I want to know is: what were the challenges specific to your story?

  NM: Well, I can tell you about the great sense of relief I felt once I’d finally figured out the character of Jonah, one of the novel’s two central figures. Neither of the characters has a life that resembles my own, in the details. But the young woman, Luz, presented a puzzle I was much more conscious of from the get-go. I spent all my time thinking about her, and I knew who Luz was before I knew Jonah. And so the story grew out of her character, first. I got pretty far down the road and Jonah was still wooden—a name moving around, some flat dialogue. The question of his character became, then, much more rigid: who he was had to fit what was already there. It shouldn’t have worked out this way, but I got lucky. I was going through some old stories and I discovered that I’d already written about him. The story, “Bird Shot,” originally published by the Southern Review, features an unnamed child, duck hunting with his older brother, while their eldest brother has been sent to war. I wondered if this boy could grow into being Jonah nine years later. The timing, with a few tweaks, worked out. The character fit. Suddenly I had all this family history to work with. It was his origins, his roots, that I’d been missing. These were also things—I was learning—that would bear a lot of thematic weight in The Infinite.

  y450-293

  AE: What are the books that inspired The Infinite?

  NM: I benefited from reading some top-shelf works of reportage. To single out a few… Ioan Grillo’s El Narco, John Gibler’s To Die in Mexico. So much of the late, great Charles Bowden’s work. In particular El Sicario, which is an autobiography of an unnamed man, recorded, transcribed, and edited by Bowden and Molly Molloy (Molloy also manages the website fronteralist.org, a vital resource on border issues and drug war violence). I also stand in awe of the Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez, who is doing some of the most important work on our continent.

  While writing, I also read the collected poems of Octavio Paz, often Eliot Weinberger’s translations when necessary. Paz has a line in a poem called “Niña” that lodged itself in my head. I kept coming back to it again and again: Es transparente el infinito. I started thinking about the eternal, the essential—the transparency of it, in this sense, implies something separate from mere invisibility. It implies to me a lens through which we obsess over the temporal, and perhaps the inconsequent, but we don’t recognize that the lens exists. It asks us to consider what we are maybe failing to notice because what we don’t see is often the most indispensable, the most crucial. For The Infinite then, I was thinking about New Orleans, where I live and where this story begins. I was thinking about those who came and rebuilt the city. I was thinking about young people, marginalized, ignored—their experiences becoming casualties or collateral damage of so-called progress.

  AE: A good friend of mine recently described New Orleans as “the most European city in America and also the most African city in America.” What made you settle there? How has that city influenced your creative life?

  NM: Writing about New Orleans isn’t easy. For one, it’s hard to define. I can understand why your friend describes it that way. I’ve also heard it called the “northernmost Caribbean city.” That all might work, I don’t know. The fabric of the place is endlessly complicated and wonderfully varied. Something about it inspires a sense of ownership, too—each person’s version of New Orleans is the accurate one, and people aren’t shy about letting you know when your description of the city doesn’t match their understanding of it. But both of you are right, that’s the thing. The truth wears a lot of different hats here.

  Two, New Orleans just doesn’t translate easily to fiction. The other week, I was walking our dog. I had a beer in hand. Suddenly, a parade came around the corner. Not a very big parade. It was a weekday, in the middle of the afternoon, no apparent holiday. This is a small street, in the backwater of a Mid-City neighborhood. The parade consisted of a couple small boats raised onto wheels, pulled by hand. People sat in the boats, drinking, waving to literally nobody. The marchers danced as they shuffled. A few towed coolers with drinks. I stress: nobody was even watching this parade. Music from a portable stereo, maybe. I seem to remember a PA attached to one of the boats, but I’m not sure—my dog, an eighty-pound boxer, got spooked, and turned and yanked me all the way home. Spilled beer all over the damn place. Maybe it was a practice run for some other parade, I don’t know. The point is that while it was unexpected it was utterly unsurprising. Of course some people put boats onto wheels and spent the afternoon towing them around the neighborhood, drinking and dancing. Of course they did. There’s a fun thing you can put into a story, if you can figure out how to explain it.

  AE: How does that experience translate into your fiction?

  nickmainieriHS-4443-1024x821

  NM: Every time I go for a walk I’m in love with the city all over again. People say hi from their porches. Ask a few questions. Wish you well. Despite whatever worries New Orleans has, or maybe in part because of them, a very real sense of community exists, of stewardship. Hardworking people who care about each other, who care about each other’s work, too. The arts community is an extension of this. The ways that people have fun is an extension of this. It’s what I found when I moved here almost nine years ago. As if others had said to me, If you’re here, you’re in this with us. I needed it then. Still do.

  More than anything, maybe, New Orleans has taught me how to observe. How to be still and watch and listen. Fiction comes from that as much as it does from reflection, or from within the writer’s own mind. I think it’s actually less a matter of being near outrageous or unusual things (like that drunken boat parade) and more like learning to note the particular fractures in the sidewalk when you go walking. Small things. I think it’s important for writers of fiction to be able to explore, no real purpose to it aside from noticing what there is to notice. You try to describe those things, consider how they might texture your story. The warm sound of somebody’s laughter filtered through a screen door. The aroma of the sweet olive on the corner. The old cobblestone, like fossil where the pavement has eroded away. The quick pulse of a passing car stereo and the warping of the sound as it moves away.

  Tiny-House

  Nicholas Mainieri’s debut novel, The Infinite, will be published by Harper Perennial in November of 2016. Born in Miami, Florida, in 1983, Nicholas has also lived in Colorado and Indiana. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, he earned his MFA from the University of New Orleans. His short stories have appeared in the Southern Review, the Southern Humanities Review, and Salamander, among other literary magazines. He currently teaches writing and literature at Nicholls State University, located in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana. He resides in New Orleans with his wife and son.

  Andrew Ervin is the author of the novel Burning Down George Orwell’s House (Soho Press) and a series of novellas, Extraordinary Renditions (Coffee House Press). His nonfiction Bit by Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World (Basic Books) will be published next year.

• Nicholas Mainieri Home Page - http://nicholasmainieri.com/bio/

  BIO

  Nicholas Mainieri’s debut novel is The Infinite.

  Born in Miami, Florida, in 1983, Nicholas has also lived in Colorado and Indiana. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, he earned his MFA from the University of New Orleans.

  His short stories have appeared in the Southern Review, the Southern Humanities Review, and Salamander, among other literary magazines. He currently teaches writing and literature at Nicholls State University, located in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana.

  He resides in New Orleans with his wife and son.

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Nicholas-Mainieri/e/B01ETVCMY2/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

  Nicholas Mainieri
  Nicholas Mainieri
  Follow
  Nicholas Mainieri is the author of The Infinite, a novel.

  Born in Miami, Florida, in 1983, Nicholas has also lived in Colorado and Indiana. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, he earned his MFA from the University of New Orleans.

  His short stories have appeared in the Southern Review, the Southern Humanities Review, and Salamander, among other literary magazines. He currently teaches writing and literature at Nicholls State University, located in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana.

  He resides in New Orleans with his wife and son.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mexicos-enduring-contrasts-an-interview-with-nicholas-mainieri/

  QUOTED: "I don’t know how conscious a choice that was, the parallel coming-of-age story. I mean, I’m naturally drawn to those kinds of stories. I’m interested in the ways we each come to discover hard truths about life, about the world — and often these are things (e.g., love, violence, death, grief) we discover and learn to incorporate into our beings when we’re young. That’s something almost all of us share, I think, and so it seems a natural spot to find stories, to bridge our individual experiences."
  "As far as Mexico being a destination … I love Mexico, personally, but I also have a fondness for what seems to be a subgenre of Anglo-American literature, the going-to-Mexico story. In some ways, I was aware of working in that perceived tradition; hopefully I’ve advanced the tradition — whether or not I actually have I’ll leave to the reader. But for this novel, in particular, something also seemed resonant about having the characters’ journeys bookended in some fashion by New Orleans and parts of Mexico."

  Mexico’s Enduring Contrasts: An Interview with Nicholas Mainieri
  Andrea Penman-Lomeli interviews Nicholas Mainieri

  DECEMBER 10, 2016

  NICHOLAS MAINIERI’S debut novel, The Infinite, follows a young couple, Luz and Jonah, from post-Katrina New Orleans to northern Mexico as they make sense of the drug war and the political reality of the border. When Katrina ravages New Orleans, Luz’s father, an undocumented worker, joins the reconstruction efforts, and young Luz follows him to the city soon after. However, when Luz becomes pregnant and her father can no longer provide for her, she returns to her grandmother and her childhood home in northeastern Mexico. Directionless and frustrated, Jonah sets out to bring her back, only to find another Luz when he reaches her home. What begins as a rumination on teen love set against the backdrop of a New Orleans in transition, quickly plunges deep into the tangled network of Mexico’s cartels and narco violence.
  New Orleans–based Mainieri crafts both characters with striking lucidity, yet portrays Luz’s journey — fraught with drug lords, shoot-outs, and loss — with sincerity and compassion. Although Mainieri centers the violence in northern Mexico, he depicts the drug war as having no geographic center and ultimately targeting the most marginalized on both sides of the border. A unique iteration of the coming-of-age story and a politically urgent read, The Infinite dares to unearth the logic that induces violence in communities internationally while challenging monolithic depictions of violence-ridden Mexico.
  At a delicate political moment, with unflinching honesty and grace, Mainieri concentrates on devastating stories that people on both sides of the border would perhaps rather ignore. In the conversation that follows, Mainieri addressed contemporary Mexican literature, writing as representation, and the sociopolitical reality of the border.
  ¤
  ANDREA PENMAN-LOMELI: You’ve published a number of short stories in literary magazines. Did any of those pieces lead to the writing of this novel? How long did it take you to write the novel?
  NICHOLAS MAINIERI: A story called “Bird Shot,” which was originally published in The Southern Review, came to be the origin story for Jonah. I hadn’t quite planned that — I lucked into it. The novel really grew out of Luz’s character, before I knew who Jonah was. Some time later, pretty far down the road with a draft, I was looking through some old stories and wondered if the nameless boy in “Bird Shot,” who’s duck hunting with his big brother while their eldest brother is being shipped to war, might grow to become Jonah. And it worked. Once I had that, I think I was in good shape — things like family, history, origin, and so on, were coming to matter a great deal thematically in the novel, and now I had Jonah’s history. As far as how long it took … I wrote the first words of a draft sometime in 2010 and finished writing the final draft about a year and a half ago.
  Why did you choose a (parallel) coming-of-age story? Were you inspired by other, similar stories? Was it significant that the destination of both their journeys was Mexico?
  I don’t know how conscious a choice that was, the parallel coming-of-age story. I mean, I’m naturally drawn to those kinds of stories. I’m interested in the ways we each come to discover hard truths about life, about the world — and often these are things (e.g., love, violence, death, grief) we discover and learn to incorporate into our beings when we’re young. That’s something almost all of us share, I think, and so it seems a natural spot to find stories, to bridge our individual experiences. As far as Mexico being a destination … I love Mexico, personally, but I also have a fondness for what seems to be a subgenre of Anglo-American literature, the going-to-Mexico story. In some ways, I was aware of working in that perceived tradition; hopefully I’ve advanced the tradition — whether or not I actually have I’ll leave to the reader. But for this novel, in particular, something also seemed resonant about having the characters’ journeys bookended in some fashion by New Orleans and parts of Mexico. Just a few weeks ago, I was reading Jorge Hernández’s introduction to Sun, Stone, and Shadows (the excellent anthology of Mexican short fiction); he calls Mexico a place of “enduring contrasts.” New Orleans very much embodies that description as well.
  Jonah and Luz bond over their dead parents and nearly orphan status. Is there a reason why their coming-of-age story involves little respect for a concrete parental figure?
  If this story is concerned, in the background, with large societal forces, I wanted to closely follow characters who are caught up in and marginalized by those forces. Young people are often going to bear the worst or longest lasting effects of things like societal greed and violence, corrupt politics — and I’d imagined the backdrop of this story to be an inextricable fabric made of those kinds of things. I came to think that protagonists who are virtually on their own could bring these notions to the fore.
  Your epigraph is a quotation from Octavio Paz, and almost half the novel is set in Mexico. Were you influenced in any way by Mexican literature? Or your own experience in Mexico?
  My most significant experiences in Mexico occurred over a couple summers spent in and around the state of Guanajuato when I was in graduate school. I was studying, but I wasn’t consciously conducting research for this novel — the idea hadn’t occurred to me yet. Though, naturally, this wouldn’t have been a story I’d have attempted otherwise. The Paz line comes from a poem called “Niña” (he wrote at least two poems titled this that I’ve seen; this is from the older of those two) that I read while working on the novel. The poem seemed to speak to the themes of the novel, and, yes, I would think, influenced their development. As a writer, in general, I count works of Mexican literature among my influences. I’m as influenced by Rulfo and Azuela as I am by Yeats and Joyce and so on. I started reading the great contemporary author Yuri Herrera sometime while working on The Infinite. He’s extraordinarily talented.
  Although you paint the narcos as ruthless, you expose a different logic for participation in these gangs; it is not so much whether you are in or out, but rather which gang you belong to specifically, based on family connections and what that gang can provide. Why did you choose to depict it in this way? Instead of, say, inserting the state or paramilitary forces?
  I did actually attempt to make suggestions across this range of possibilities. One of the novel’s main antagonists is a former policeman, for instance. There are also suggestions about other ancillary characters’ origins, of course, and the notion of state or paramilitary involvement is at least touched on a few times, even outright stated once or twice. But I think of these as small details. My primary intention for the novel was to write a story about Luz and Jonah, their lives and choices, caught as they are against a turbulent, fraught backdrop. Exploring El Narco could not be my primary aim, but in the sense that the drug trade itself (its fuel and its consequences) was going to be part of this fictional world, I wanted the full thing to be implied as best as I could manage, for there to be a depth behind what our characters encounter. I wanted it to feel like what we’re brushing against with Luz and Jonah has a nearly boundless, implacable enterprise behind it. But to your question about family being the thing that draws some of the characters into the violence … I’d imagine that there are many reasons or impulses for why individuals would become involved, and this is one of them. Of course, we’re attempting here to place a logical framework upon something (the choice to become a murderer) that on some level exists outside the bounds of logic, but for the novel it still had to make narrative sense. Family ties, vendettas, and so on, drive a lot of the drug-trade-related violence in New Orleans, and so I appreciated the echo of this at both ends of the narrative, but also at both ends of the trade itself. And I also thought, specific to the events in the novel, it might work best to focus in on a local fictional conflict that was part of the larger war developing across northeastern Mexico in the spring of 2010, when the novel is set.
  Did you feel any hesitation in being as graphic as you were with Mexican violence, given the way that Mexico is portrayed in the media?
  I finished writing this book before the recent election cycle began, but the novel was inspired, in a different way, by the election cycle of 2008. Many of my neighbors in New Orleans at that time were recién llegados, jornaleros, people who’d come to the city for rebuilding work after Hurricane Katrina. Mexican, Honduran, Nicaraguan. Once election season rolled around, I became appalled by political attack ads on TV that vilified the people the city literally owed its existence to. These ads, as I recall them, were chock-full of offensive language and stereotypes. At the time, they were just local ads (though I think I read somewhere that versions of them ran in a few markets around the country). Of course, that kind of rhetoric — all the “beware the barbarians at the gate” bullshit — has only multiplied exponentially since then, sadly. But I did envision this as a story written against that kind of stuff.
  When I began working on The Infinite, more than six years ago, my feeling was that, broadly, the American media was not paying adequate attention to a terrible thing that was driven, largely, by our country’s appetites — a hunger matched by our capacity to turn a blind eye toward consequence. A lot has changed since then, in terms of coverage in the United States; but, yeah, whatever news coverage exists, however El Narco appears in pop culture, whatever one-liners make their way into political discourse, it never extends into the territory of nuance or understanding or compassion. Or the acknowledgment of complicity. It doesn’t account for all of Mexico, either, or even very much of Mexico. We get used to consuming the sensational, monolithic, romantic notions of violence that often result in sweeping, harmful generalizations. My belief is that novels can, and should, work as antidotes to this, chiefly because in a novel we’ve got the lens of character.
  It is a novelist’s job to be unflinching in portraying violent realities, sure, but also to be mindful of the effect on the character and the suggestion beyond the page. I’m hopeful I haven’t created any false, sweeping impressions, though I recognize the possibility — and sure, I was conscious of that while writing. I was aware of that with regard to New Orleans, too, which can also be an extraordinarily violent place (as is likewise depicted in the novel).
  How did you prepare to write Luz’s character? Did you find it challenging to write from the perspective of a female, undocumented immigrant from Mexico?
  None of the characters in this novel have lives or beings that resemble my own, but I do think I was most conscious of, most appreciative of, the responsibility and the challenge of Luz’s character from the get-go. Which is to say I tried to write her with as much intelligence and respect as I could muster. I’m proud of her, and I certainly hope she works for most readers, too. I imagine Luz grew, initially, out of certain people I’d met or spoken with, but I also hear the voices of a lot of women I look up to in my own life speaking through her. I don’t think I can say much about any kind of specific method of preparation, other than I just spent a lot of time thinking about her, writing her, rewriting her.
  You mention that there is a border separating Luz and Jonah. Did you feel in writing their relationship that there were certain cultural facts that prevented them from understanding each other, or at least Jonah understanding Luz?
  Thank you for asking this question. I’m hesitant to answer, however, because I don’t wish to interpret the book for anybody else; I know how I feel or what I think something in the book means, but I personally believe that the truth of a story exists somewhere between the page and the individual reader. Still, I’ll say that the operative facts in the moment you refer to are not cultural but experiential. To my mind, at least, that is what it is. That, in some fashion, the border separating them owes itself in part to what the actual geopolitical border has forced or imposed upon them (mainly Luz), but it is also the result of things they’ve each encountered and taken into their beings … I don’t know how much more I can say without revealing too many plot details.
  The graduate student Victor says he’s more interested in what will emerge from Mexico than the politics of the drug war itself. Did that opinion shape your writing of the novel?
  And thanks for asking this, too! No one has asked me about this scene, yet, and I humbly think it is an important one. I wish to stress that the opinion you’re referring to is a character’s, and not my own. If the opinion exerted any influence it was in my hopes of subverting it. I wanted the little lecture Victor gives to sound like something you’d find in academic historical or literary analyses, all the regeneration-through-violence stories we tell ourselves long after the fact. But for me — what follows is the opinion that shaped my idea of the novel — the most important detail in this scene is Jonah’s reaction to Victor. Jonah is pissed off; Jonah is angry because what Victor is saying doesn’t account for the individual or even the small group of individuals (a family or group of friends) who bear the effects of the violence, who must somehow navigate its aftermath, not in academic terms but in utterly real ones.
  ¤
  Andrea Penman-Lomeli is an editor at The News, an English-language newspaper in Mexico City.

QUOTED: "Mainieri's novel is a pertinent dissection of place, class, roots, and identity."

The Infinite
Publishers Weekly. 263.36 (Sept. 5, 2016): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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The Infinite

Nicholas Mainieri. Harper Perennial, $15.99 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-246556-6

"Sometimes the wrong turn is the only turn offered" is the anthem of the ill-fated characters who wade through post-Katrina New Orleans and cartel-ravaged Mexico in Mainieri's engrossing debut novel about finding one's place in the world. Luz Hidalgo is a teenage undocumented Latina brought to New Orleans during the post-Katrina construction boom that lured her unemployed single father. She loves 18-year-old Jonah McBee, an orphan who shares her sense of loss and inconstancy, and Luz soon becomes pregnant. Unable to provide for her, Luz's father sends her back to her grandmother in Mexico, disregarding Jonah's tepid plans to enlist in the army to care for his new family. When Jonah doesn't hear from her, he drives to Mexico, unaware that she has encountered a violent run-in with the Mexican Gulf drug cartel that has plunged her into a web of bloodshed and altered her world forever. Jonah shows up at her door, but Luz is dramatically different, and the two must reconcile all that has changed between them and find a new path, now that the old one has vanished. Mainieri's novel is a pertinent dissection of place, class, roots, and identity. Agent: Elizabeth Copps, Maria Carvainis Agency. (Nov.)

QUOTED: "YAs will be captivated by this story of two teens from different backgrounds grappling with the aftermath of a natural disaster."

The Infinite
Sara Martinez
Booklist. 113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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The Infinite. By Nicholas Mainieri. Sept. 2016. 384p. Harper, paper, $15.99 (9780062465566).

Luz Hidalgo, who runs high-school track, and homeboy Jonah McBee are star-crossed lovers in Mainieri's debut novel. Luz has followed her father to New Orleans after the death of her mother, and Jonah, left on his own, is contemplating military recruitment, even though his older brother was killed in Afghanistan. Their prospects as an undocumented immigrant and a marginalized orphan are not optimal in post-Katrina New Orleans, and their vague hopes for lives of their own choosing come crashing down altogether when Luz discovers she is pregnant. Her papa sends her back to her abuela (grandmother) on a trip that leaves beautiful Luz fighting for her life amid the narco wars infesting northern Mexico. Although Jonah's pursuit of Luz is less perilous, nothing works out as either of them anticipated. This double bildungsroman unfolds in chapters alternating between Luz's and Jonah's points of view and between Luz's home pueblo, Las Monarcas, and Jonah's hometown, New Orleans. Mainieri presents a striking tale of two resilient and resourceful young adults as they set their sights on a tenuous future.--Sara Martinez

YA: YAs will be captivated by this story of two teens from different backgrounds grappling with the aftermath of a natural disaster and the ghosts of family tragedies. SM.

• Washington Independent Review of Books
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-infinite-a-novel
  Word count: 1082

  QUOTED: "I haven’t read a debut as accomplished as Mainieri’s in quite a while. When was the last time, I thought to myself, that I came across a first novel with truly beautiful sentences that gather into a stirring narrative? Where the sentence-level writing surprises and delights as much as the depth of character illuminates and propulsive plot entertains? The Infinite achieves these things and more and has earned its comparisons to Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy, masters of story and language."

  The Infinite: A Novel
  By Nicholas Mainieri Harper Perennial 384 pp.
  Reviewed by Blake Kimzey
  January 2, 2017
  This exceptional debut, set in post-Katrina New Orleans and northern Mexico, weaves a complex tale of love and loss.

  I admit my bias: I like reading fiction architected from the dirt up, where setting not only matters but is as central to the telling of the story as are the characters. And here, in Nicholas Mainieri’s thrilling debut, The Infinite, post-Katrina New Orleans and northeastern Mexico share top billing with young high-school couple Luz Hidalgo, a track star, and Jonah McBee, an orphan, in a narrative that braids together their love story with the political realities of the border and the drug war that ties it all together.

  The concerns of the novel are the concerns of its main characters, how they navigate their place in the world, tethered to class and the cultural roots that shape who they are and act as the anchoring force that keeps them on either side of the border. With each chapter, the story alternates points of view, switching deftly from Jonah to Luz and back again, inhabiting each character as their twin journeys unfold.

  It is the opportunity to work as a day laborer that brings Luz's undocumented father to flood-ravaged New Orleans. After he establishes a home and an income-stream, Luz braves the border and joins her father in Louisiana; she enrolls in school, where she finds her calling as a sprinter. But it is in the hallways that she meets and falls in love with Jonah, a sensitive young man with no compass for the future.

  Despite many differences, they find solace in each other, Luz “no stranger to despair, that incurable sickness cultivated in the lonely years before Jonah.”

  Luz’s romance with Jonah is cut short, though, when her father finds out she is pregnant. Luz is quickly sent back to Mexico to live with her grandmother in Las Monarcas, where monarch butterflies migrate each year. Call it the inciting incident; we are soon off to the races, the pages turning themselves.

  Shortly after returning home, Luz must contend with Mexican cartels and narco violence of the highest order. When Jonah doesn’t hear from her, he embarks on an ill-fated road trip with his best friend, Colby, to find her. Colby peels off before they cross the border, and Jonah is left to fend for himself.

  Though sincere, Jonah is out of his depth, lacking the money and language to navigate Mexico; he finds himself adrift in a land he knows little about. Jonah is earnest in his quest to find Luz, if not sentimental, already feeling the responsibility of a father, electric with desire to shelter and protect. He has hatched a plan to join the Army after graduation in order to provide for his wife and child and is desperate to share this map of their futures together, if only he can find Luz.

  Meanwhile, Luz is run through a maze of horrors, colliding with the cartel, enduring shootouts, and finding herself witness to executions, “the vantage into her future constricted to a keyhole.”

  Mainieri has imbued Luz’s story with real tension, the stakes of her survival giving the pages their pulse. Luz is smart and resourceful and survives these encounters only to find herself helplessly intrigued, not so much with the cartel as by those it employs. It is a path she walks down, each step further from Jonah and closer to the comfort of the despair she had always known:

  “She saw her future, her new future, charted like a course on a map. She would be home in Las Monarcas, and she would have her own child. It would be the same migration, one year and then the next, and she would repeat the same ritual, one year and then the next. That is your life. It is determined. Can you do it, Luz? Can you do it? She looked at the monarchs where they rested, and fear filled her.”

  These encounters, of course, are more than collisions; they are the things that shape Luz and Jonah as individuals and allow their relationship to sift through the sands of the Mexican desert. Mainieri is a brilliant literary mason, troweling in the mortar of an emotional wall brick by brick — one more insurmountable than the border Luz and Jonah must cross to find each other.

  I hesitate to offer much more of a summary at the expense of revealing wonderfully conceived plot points. Suffice to say the novel does not offer a fairytale reality of the border or the attendant drug war. Part of the book’s power is the fact that Mainieri doesn’t shy away from these realities and their effect on his characters. The human cost is not elided, providing the engine that combusts over and over again to propel Jonah and Luz’s story forward.

  I haven’t read a debut as accomplished as Mainieri’s in quite a while. When was the last time, I thought to myself, that I came across a first novel with truly beautiful sentences that gather into a stirring narrative? Where the sentence-level writing surprises and delights as much as the depth of character illuminates and propulsive plot entertains? The Infinite achieves these things and more and has earned its comparisons to Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy, masters of story and language.

  Blake Kimzey’s fiction has been broadcast on NPR and published by Tin House, McSweeney’s, Redivider, Green Mountains Review, the Los Angeles Review, and Short Fiction, among others. He holds an MFA from UC-Irvine and received an Emerging Writer Grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. He teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas.