Francisco Goldman's sixth book takes its title from the 30-mile-long ribbon of motorway that encloses the heart of Mexico City, where the Guatemalan-American novelist and journalist has lived for most of the last 20 years. But the title also refers to the agonising loop of grief in which Goldman has been caught since the death of his wife, the writer Aura Estrada, in an accident in 2007. His previous book, Say Her Name, published in 2011, was both a tribute to his wife and an unflinching investigation into what loss does to those left behind. The Interior Circuit is in part an account of Goldman's attempts to "find a way to live in Mexico City without Aura", a therapeutic rediscovery of the place he has long made his home.
His quest begins with what he calls "one of those inertia-defying widowerhood decisions" – taking driving lessons, a project that holds out the neat metaphorical promise of reasserting control over his life. Though Goldman is not a beginner: "I did know how to drive," he writes, "but I didn't know how to drive in Mexico City", with its "octopus intersections and roundabouts like wide Demolition Derby arenas; cars densely crisscrossing simultaneously from all directions and all somehow missing each other, streaming through each other like ghosts". After a few weeks, he is ready to navigate the city's "seemingly countless jigsaw-puzzle neighbourhoods". He experiments by picking streets at random from the Guía Roji, the impossibly exhaustive Mexico City street atlas, and wending his way there in a motoring equivalent of the Oulipo's games of chance or the Situationists' dérives.
Goldman's "driving project" is only one of a number of threads running through the book, whose real subject is the city itself – its bewildering vastness, its riotous dynamism, its prodigious jumble of textures and colours. Though the city is often known as the Distrito Federal, or DF for short, it has long since overspilled the administrative entity that was supposed to contain it, spreading into neighbouring Mexico state to the north, east and west. "From the air, on a flight in," Goldman observes, "what the eye mostly picks out from the megacity's stunning enormousness is a dense mosaic of flat rooftops, tiny rectangles and squares." For Goldman, such aerial views make Mexico City look "like a map of itself, drawn on a scale of 1:1, as in the Borges story 'The Exactitude of Science'". But the metropolis is no airy abstraction: he evokes the "mysterious energy" that "seems to silently thrum from the ground, from restless volcanic earth", but which "is also produced, I like to think, by the pavement-pounding footsteps of the millions upon millions who labour every day in the city".
The book is also centrally concerned with the capital's contradictory relationship with the country as a whole. Home to a sixth of the population and the centre of almost all political and economic power, it has so far largely been spared the wave of narcoviolence that has swept Mexico in the last decade, as the battle between the cartels and the authorities – often believed to themselves be in the pay of one or other cartel – has spread "disappearances" and summary executions across the land. Mexico City seemed somehow immune (although there is, of course, still corruption and crime aplenty). The contrast troubles Goldman: "Vivimos adentro de una burbuja – 'We live inside a bubble', I'm always hearing people in the DF say. People sense the entire country collapsing, even vanishing, around them, becoming, as one friend put it, an 'anti-country'." Why was the capital apparently unaffected – and how long could things stay that way?
One obvious explanation for the difference, according to Goldman, is Mexico City's scale: it is simply too vast for the cartels to take it over. And given its economic importance, it would surely not be in the drug lords' interests to turn it into a combat zone. Mexico City also stands out from the rest of the country in its politics: since 1998, the DF has elected a string of centre-left local governments from the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution), who have pushed through several progressive social policies – monthly pensions for single mothers and the elderly, increased benefits for the unemployed, legalisation of abortion and same-sex marriage – that put the capital's political centre of gravity well to the left of the rest of Mexico. In Goldman's view, all this has helped make it a more prosperous, tolerant and pleasant place to live, while perhaps taking the edge off the inequalities that create misery for so many. The capital's political desynchronisation from the rest of the country has also kept at bay the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which ruled uncontested for 71 years until 2000, and regained the presidency in 2012 with Enrique Peña Nieto.
But as the second half of The Interior Circuit makes clear, Mexico City's seeming immunity to narcoviolence has come under increasing strain in the past few years – and cracks have begun to open up. At its midpoint the book switches to a more reportorial style, and the mood becomes more sombre. Its focus from now on will be the murky "After Heavens" case: the kidnapping in broad daylight, in May 2013, of 12 people outside a club in the Zona Rosa, an area in the city centre known for its nightlife. Goldman followed the case closely over the following few months, speaking repeatedly to relatives of the disappeared, who were mostly from Tepito, a poor neighbourhood long stigmatised as a hive of criminality. There was clearly an element of class disdain in official dealings with the families. But there was something more sinister, too: the brazen nature of the kidnapping suggested police complicity, an impression the incompetence and evasions of the authorities did little to dispel.
In August 2013, the bodies of the seven men and five women were found, most of them decapitated in narco-style executions, though the victims themselves had no known connection to the drug trade. Several arrests were later made, including various low-level crooks and police officers, but the true authors of the atrocity and why it actually happened remain unknown. Theories and rumours swirl – one of them, cited by Goldman, points to a concerted attempt by cartels linked to the former ruling PRI party to burst the DF's bubble, and bring the city back under its sway. Either way, something large and poisonous seems to be unfolding, in which the lives of a few poor tepiteños count for nothing. The Interior Circuit ends on a note of solidarity with their families, and those of the tens of thousands of other victims of Mexico's "war on drugs", who have all been "sent on journeys that they, individually or banded together, will mostly have to endure alone, through that place without solace where the dead often seem more alive than the living".
Goldman's ability to combine a close understanding of bereavement – "its listlessness, loneliness and withdrawal", "its grinding solipsism" – with an account of the larger, ongoing tragedy of Mexico's narcoviolence is perhaps the strongest feature of this engaging and often moving book. The Interior Circuit's subtitle bills it as a "chronicle", signalling its free-ranging, diaristic style. But it's also a crónica, a journalistic genre in the Spanish-speaking world that embraces reportage, commentary and analysis. Goldman is writing in several modes at once, and the result can sometimes seem a little disjointed. But it's done with such generosity, charm and conviction that the journey is a rewarding one.
• The Interior Circuit is published by Grove Atlantic.
