IN THE MIDST OF WINTER

By Isabel Allende

Translated by Nick Calstor and Amanda Hopkinson

342 pp. Atria Books. $28

In Isabel Allende’s new novel, a snowstorm and a car accident bring three people together on an unexpected journey that transforms their lives. As if this premise is not sufficiently hackneyed, Allende adds literary insult to injury by spelling it out in breathy prose: “Over the next three days, as the storm wearied of punishing the land and dissolved far out to sea, the lives of Lucia Maraz, Richard Bowmaster and Evelyn Ortega would become inextricably linked.” The novel is riddled with such formulations. Seemingly intended to stab at the surreal, fablelike quality for which Allende is known, they come off as merely soppy and uninspired.

In fact, the story owes less to magical realism than to histrionic crime dramas. Richard, a lonely, aging professor, sets out in a car from his Brooklyn apartment and collides with a vehicle being driven by Evelyn, an undocumented immigrant who happens to be driving her employer’s car. She turns up at his apartment later that night, distraught and unintelligible, her Spanglish broken by a stammer she developed after suffering a brutal gang assault in her native Guatemala. Richard calls his tenant Lucia, a middle-aged visiting Chilean professor under his direction at N.Y.U., to help. The three split a pot brownie, as one does during blizzards with strangers, and swap life stories.

Image

It comes out that there is a corpse in Evelyn’s trunk, which won’t close thanks to the crash. She is terrified of returning the damaged car to her employer, the abusive Frank Leroy, who is sure to come after her if he knows she’s seen the body. Naturally, Evelyn can’t go to the police either. Moved by her plight, Richard and Lucia decide to help her dump car and corpse. This fantastic bit of plot — why on earth should they undertake such a risk for a stranger who, for all they know, committed the murder herself? — is supposed to be justified by their own immigrant histories: Lucia fled Chile’s military junta in the 1970s; Richard, whose father escaped the Nazis, hears “his father’s voice deep inside him reminding him of his duty to help the persecuted.”