The resulting novel has the quality of a fable, in which the banished words are barely submerged. Their replacement by symbols, allusions, or close cognates makes the political reality underlying the novels both more distant and more disquieting. To read Herrera is to be immersed, almost involuntarily, in the uncanny ... Herrera’s characters aren’t good guys so much as they are people who are not quite of the world that seeks to harm them. Their detachment protects them and lets them serve as guides ... At one point in Kingdom Cons The Artist boasts, 'If you’re just saying what happened, why bother with a song? Corridos aren’t only true; they’re also beautiful and just.' He may come to realize how his corridos can be used to other ends, but Herrera’s novels stay beautiful and just.
This cunning little drama about the line separating art from agitprop is, like the other books, translated with colloquial verve by Lisa Dillman. The Artist’s mission statement could speak for the whole of Mr. Herrera’s daring and memorable project: 'Let them be scared, let the decent take offense. Put them to shame. Why else be an artist?'
On the surface, Herrera writes about people along the border between Mexico and the United States (inspired, one can guess, by his time spent in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez), but his real subject is a border condition, a state of exile, an existence between two extremes — this side and the other side, narco and gringo, life and death … The book is written as a modern-day fable, self-conscious but restrained, mixing titular names with a studied attention to what Herrera calls the narco-aesthetic — opulent, insular, ultra-violent — drawing connections between ancient stories of royal courts and the kingpin sagas of our time … Kingdom Cons sometimes falters under the strain of the weight of its ambition...But the novel soars in places where legend and fine detail merge into something original and true.
If all this sounds a bit high camp, that’s because it is. Herrera isn’t concerned with restraint, or showing rather than telling, or anything so boring as the default middlebrow realism or polite language games of much English-language fiction. A bit like a narcocorrido, Kingdom Cons takes the materials of Mexico’s present and presses them into older forms. Those forms endue a frequently unbearable present with formal weight, comforting fatalism, and a certain saving weirdness … Kingdom Cons, like the novels that preceded it, is serious only in that it’s fundamentally unserious, a treatise on modern cultural subjectivities only in that it’s also an entertainment. As much as form, it’s about process. The Artist’s only concern is to be a conduit for whatever it is that has hold of him: music, loyalty, words.
...[a] slim yet powerful novel ... Strikingly beautiful and thematically rich passages are followed by scenes of gritty realism, as members of the court are mysteriously killed and warfare ultimately breaks out with other local factions ... The novel is a powerful and memorable meditation on the social and economic value of art in a world ruled by the pursuit of power.
