“They traveled the roads and byways of the West, unhurriedly and with no set itinerary, changing their route according to the whim of the moment, the premonitory sign of a flock of birds, the lure of an unknown name.” The opening sentence of Isabelle Allende’s The Infinite Plan introduces, not only the saga of the Reeves family, but the lush and wandering plot of the novel.
The Infinite Plan focuses on the life of Gregory Reeves, the son of an itinerant artist and “Doctor in Divine Sciences” who preaches his theory of the Infinite Plan.
The early scenes of Gregory Reeves' life, set during WWII, remind one of Steinbeck’s descriptions of a hardscrabble West. Allende’s focus is on the marginalized: the peripatetic Reeves family, the Mexican-American residents of L.A.’s barrios, an African-American soldier and his mother, the half-Vietnamese son of Reeves’ foster “brother.” The few middle-class white characters of The Infinite Plan occupy the margins of the plan, in an inversion of common media-portrayed norms.
While well-written overall, with engaging characters and Allende’s characteristically lyrical prose, The Infinite Plan begins rather slowly with a dense and somewhat meandering start. It feels almost as though once the Reeves family settle into their place in the barrio, the novel settles into its stride.
The major distraction for me – and the reason I had to start the book twice – arose from the structure of the novel. The Infinite Plan has two narrators, an omniscient observer presumed to be the author, and Gregory Reeves. The transitions between what is essentially a third person narration and Reeves’ first-hand account interrupted the narrative flow more than I would have liked.
Despite its shortcomings, The Infinite Plan has some compelling and well-drawn characters, particularly Olga, the gypsy-esque healer/charlatan who serves as an honorary aunt to the young Gregory; Carmen, Reeves’ childhood friend and sometime lover; and Gregory Reeves himself. The novel tracks Reeves from his very young years during which we see a timid and damaged boy, through the idealism of a young adulthood in the Berkeley of the late 1960’s, to jaded middle age in that jaded era of the 1980’s.
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