El Plan Infinito.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Chilean author Isabel Allende has built a reputation on her robust, larger-than-life female characters who capture our imaginations with their determination, vision, and absolute disregard for the limitations of circumstance. Hovering between the mundane and the magical, they bring into focus the paradoxes of everyday existence while at the same time transforming the banal into the mysterious and fantastic. Unfortunately, there is little of this in El plan infinito.

Gregory Reeves, protagonist of this plodding, cliche-ridden novel, is the son of a charismatic traveling preacher who hauls his rag-tag family from one town to another. Charles, the elder Reeves, has devised a philosophical system called El Plan Infinito, according to which nothing is gratuitous; everything that happens responds to a universal plan. In the hierarchy of beings that El Plan Infinito postulates, Charles Reeves occupies the highest position, which gives him absolute authority in the eyes of believers. Accompanied by his unstable wife Nora (a Russian Jew who has adopted the Bahai religion), their two children Gregory and Judy, and Nora's friend Olga (a fortune teller and medicine woman with a flair for show biz), Charles roams the southwestern United States mesmerizing crowds until illness forces him to settle down in Los Angeles.

Greg and Judy grow up in a Mexican neighborhood where they become street smart, learn Spanish, and make friends with the Moraleses, a Mexican-American family that offers them the kind of stability their own dysfunctional tribe could never provide. Greg develops an intimate, sisterly relationship with Carmen, the youngest Morales daughter, which will, quite predictably, lead to a failed love affair.

As Greg comes to realize that his father is a charlatan who has not only been carrying on with Olga, but also sexually abusing Judy, he begins to seek ways out of his sordid environment. Thanks to his friendship with Cyril, a communist elevator operator who conveniently bequeaths money to him, Greg enters Berkeley, where he becomes involved in, but not engulfed by, the free-wheeling drug-and-sex culture of the sixties. He marries a spoiled, vapid girl named Samantha and produces a daughter, but the relationship goes sour and Greg leaves for Vietnam. In the meantime, Carmen has had an abortion and been disowned by her father. After traveling to Mexico and Europe, she settles in Berkeley, where she becomes a successful jewelry designer.

Upon his...